Abstract

Hydrocarbon Producers are exploring avenues to extend the on-stream time between outages for maintenance. Key equipment that can determine the end of run includes: catalyst life, cyclone erosion, and compressor and tower fouling. Critical equipment that has been shown to be a limiting factor can be duplicated to extend run length: for example parallel pumps, reactors and reboilers. This is a successful method to extend on-stream time, expensive and in fact, at times cost prohibitive. Incorporating design guidelines that increase the on-stream time of the key pieces of equipment is a better economic decision for most plants.

Currently Refiners are planning four-year run lengths and Ethylene Producers greater than five-year run lengths. These targets present challenges for distillation column design. Potential problem areas include refining vacuum wash oil beds, ethylene plant quench and saturator towers, and butadiene and other polymer producing distillation columns. Each of these applications has some common characteristics. A review of successful and not so successful designs can help develop key design criteria. Design guidelines developed from successful applications can improve the on-stream time of each of the applications.

Introduction

Designing mass transfer equipment for fouling service requires first an understanding of the fouling mechanism, the process in which the fouling occurs, and behavior of the process when the fouling is present. An understanding of these items needs to be developed in advance of designing mass transfer equipment for fouling service.

The challenges of fouling columns can result in;

1. Increase energy consumption due to heat transfer and efficiency issues.
2. Reduced column capacity, which may lead to production loses.
3. Increased down time for cleaning and disposing of fouling wastes
4. Potential need for the use of chemical additives

 

foulingpaperfinal.pfd    (text of full paper)

Oil & Gas Part 1.pdf   (large file - use save target as)

Oil & Gas Part 2.pdf   (large file - use save target as)