Abstract
The ethylene production is regarded one of the most significant issues for chemical industries and improving its production operation can bring several benefits. Thus, the market demand for ethylene production has accelerated the improvement of a more rigorous and reliable thermal cracking model of such process. In the present study, developing a rigorous mathematical model for an industrial naphtha cracker is investigated based on experimental data combining with a kinetic model describes the coke formation on the internal reactor tubes. The best kinetic model obtained is applied for predicting the products yield, the gas temperature and the optimal temperature profiles along the reactor to maximize the profit of the process. The influence of process factors on the optimal solutions (mainly, coil outlet temperature (COT), steam to naphtha ratio (S/N) and feed flow rate on the product yields have also been discussed here, and new results of the reactor with the optimal cost and temperature profile are obtained. Modeling, simulation and optimal design via optimization of the industrial thermal cracking reactor has been carried out by gPROMS software. The optimization problems are solved employing a Successive Quadratic Programming (SQP) method formulated as a Non-Linear Programming (NLP) problem.
Highlights
The worldwide ethylene production increases rapidly, and its annual industrial production depends on the thermal cracking of oil hydrocarbons with steam, where the heart of the ethylene unit with a massive economic effect is the furnace of the cracking process [1, 2]
The new approach used in this study for maximizing the profit is better than the methods employed with all previous works that utilized various solvers to maximize the objective function to achieve the optimal design of naphtha thermal cracking reactor
An optimal design of an industrial thermal cracking reactor is investigated here within gPROMS Model Builder and an optimization framework was developed in order to tackle the optimal design and process problem of such reactor
Summary
The worldwide ethylene production increases rapidly (approximates 180 billion lb/yr), and its annual industrial production depends on the thermal cracking of oil hydrocarbons (mainly naphtha) with steam, where the heart of the ethylene unit with a massive economic effect is the furnace of the cracking process [1, 2]. The coil outlet temperature (COT) has a significant influence upon the yield of ethylene production and it should be controlled, where the temperature of the cracked gas measures at the coil output and manipulating the heat inlet to the furnace. This behavior plays an important role loop to control the thermal cracking reactors [1, 2, 4]. The model presented with accounting the impacts of coke formation has been modified via optimization process to obtain the optimum kinetic parameter that can be applied with high confidence to reactor design. The model is applied to find the optimal operations, optimal temperature profile along the reactor, decreasing of production time as well as decoking cost based on the objective function, which is the maximum profit of the process within gPROMS package
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