A NEW LUMPING SCHEME FOR MODELING AND SIMULATION OF FCCU RISER REACTOR

Abstract

Fluidized Catalytic Cracking (FCC). is one of. the most important processes in refinery, sometimes referred as the heart of the refinery. This refinery process exists for over more than 60 years and continues to evolve. Due to the high complexity of FCC units, it is possible to find in literature a great number of models that pretend to describe the FCC behavior/performance in steady state and in dynamic state. Nevertheless, numerous authors that have. studied FCC developed models for only specific parts of the FCC unit and/or kinetics of the cracking and coke burning reactions. A modem FCC unit comprises different sections such as a riser reactor, a stripper, a disengager, a regenerator, a main fractionators, catalyst transport lines (spent catalyst standpipe and regenerated catalyst standpipe) and several other auxiliary units such as: cyclones, air blower, expander, wet gas compressor, feed pre-heater, air heater, catalyst cooler, etc. The aim of this study is to obtain a model that can simulate the performance of a large operating Portuguese commercial FCCU in steady and dynamic states, which will subsequently used in studies of control and real time optimization. This work aims at compiling the important works on the modeling of a fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) riser reactor and to develop new lumping basis to minimize the gasoline yield deviation from the plant data, which is available in literature. In the present work, two different lumping schemes have considered to know the nature of kinetics of components present in crude oil. Compared the result of simulator (computational tool C++) with plant data available in literature and Gupta et al. (2007) results