Effect of catalyst-to-oil ratio and catalyst temperature on determining the yield of gasoline in the riser reactor

Abstract

Increasing the yield of Gasoline has been the desire of every crude oil refining process in the oil industry. The principal unit that has significantly contributed to increasing the yield of Gasoline is the Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) unit. The performance of the FCC unit is dependent on many parameters, substantively the catalyst-to-oil ratio (COR) and the temperature of the catalyst (tcat) when entering the riser reactor. To understand the effect of COR and tcat, a five-lump kinetics model was developed, and the simulated result was further plugged into MINITAB 7.0 software in order to generate a set of empirical equation models. The empirical equation models predicted the optimal yield of gasoline to be 56.83%, with corresponding optimal parameters of COR and temperature of catalyst as 3.35 and 900 K, respectively. The actual yield of gasoline at 3.35 COR and 900 K catalyst temperature was 56.78%, with a 0.09% error compared to the predicted yield of gasoline. The two parameters were varied with the values from previous studies, and the predicted result compared to the actual is 7.8648 root mean square error (RMSE). Therefore, the empirical equation model is reliable in predicting the yield of gasoline with respect to the COR and temperature of catalyst.