Digital simulation of industrial fluid catalytic cracking units—V. Static and dynamic bifurcation

Abstract

A dynamic model, whose steady-state version has been verified against industrial units in earlier parts of this series, is used to investigate the static and dynamic bifurcation behaviour of an industrial fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit. The investigation concentrates on fixed point and periodic attractors of this industrially important unit. The results show some of the important static and dynamic features of the unit and also point-out to means of stabilizing the unstable high gasoline yield operating points. In certain cases operating the unit on a periodic attractor can give higher gasoline yields, however more work is needed to identify regions of design and operating parameters where this possibility can be realized without the practical problems associated with it.