Flare Minimization of Ethylene Plant Start-up via Resource-Task Network Approach

Abstract

Abstract Energy utilization and environment protection has received increasing attention over the last few decades. Therefore, flare minimization has become one of the main concerns for ethylene industry. Currently, the research of flare minimization has two major approaches, which are the experience-based approach and the dynamic simulation approach. The former has some limitations when it has to confront dynamic operations. The latter adopts dynamic simulation to validate the proposed start-up plans, which lacks optimization for the start-up plans. The start-up process of an ethylene plant can be considered as a semi-continuous process. Thus, the short-term scheduling approach based on resource-task network (RTN) is firstly used in this paper to depict the super-structure of the start-up process and optimize the start-up plans. This work developed a flare minimization model for the start-up process of ethylene plant, which could overcome the aforementioned shortcoming. We established the mathematical formulation of the flare minimization model, whose reliability and adaptability was validated by 5 significant case studies. The results showed that the flare minimization model also could effectively reduce start-up durations.