Abstract
The residue hydrotreating process plays a significant role in the petroleum refining industry. In this process, modeling and simulation have critical importance for process development, control, and optimization. However, there is a lack of relevant reports of plant scale due to complexity in characterizing feedstock and determining reaction mechanisms. In this paper, reaction and fractionation models are constructed and simulated for a real-life industrial residue hydrotreating process based on Aspen HYSYS/Refining. Considering the heavier and inferior residue, analytical characterization is carried out for feedstock characterization based on laboratory analysis data. Moreover, two reactor models with parallel structures are proposed to implement the intricate reaction network, namely, a hydrocracker reactor and a plug flow reactor. The former simulates lighter petroleum hydrotreating based on the built-in reaction network. The latter emulates the conversion of a peculiar, heavier resin and asphaltene, using a six-lump model, which expands the scope of the feedstock and improves the accuracy of the model. To obtain a realistic simulation of fractionation, the database-based delumping method is adopted to model it with proper pseudo-components. The simulation results, including temperature rise, hydrogen consumption, temperature distribution, product yield, product properties, indicate that the model is capable of reflecting the realistic process accurately.
Highlights
The global energy crisis has become an urgent issue in the 21st century [1]
Three parts are displayed for the simulation: comparison of a single hydrocracker reactor (HCR) and the proposed two-reactor model, comparison of the default HCRSRK method in Aspen HYSYS/Refining and the proposed delumping method, and the prediction of the process model for the whole residue hydrotreating conversion
A novel two parallel structure is developed for reactor model
Summary
The global energy crisis has become an urgent issue in the 21st century [1]. The worldwide growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions is about 1.5% and 1.4% annually over the past 5 years [2].as the main form of energy, the remaining oil is forecasted to be available for only about50 years [2]. The global energy crisis has become an urgent issue in the 21st century [1]. The worldwide growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions is about 1.5% and 1.4% annually over the past 5 years [2]. As the main form of energy, the remaining oil is forecasted to be available for only about. The oil refineries face various challenges: growing demand for high-quality and low-boiling point products, deterioration of crude oil, ever-increasing difficulty of petroleum processing, and stringent environmental requirements. Since vacuum residue accounts for about half of the crude oil, more attention has been focused on vacuum residue hydroconversion processes, which are capable of converting heavy, inferior petroleum into light, valuable products such as gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel [3,4]. A good process model is important for monitoring the plant-level operation status, optimizing operating conditions, verifying the dynamic adjustment scheme, and maximizing the profit [5,6,7]
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