REFINERY PROCESS SIMULATION USING CONTINUOUS MIXTURE CHARACTERIZATION

Abstract

Petroleum mixtures comprise of thousands of components. Modeling of the processes which are dealing with such type of complex mixtures seems to be difficult. The composition of such mixtures can be represented by a continuous distribution function instead of a discrete representation. Continuous model-ing of refinery processes has been carried out by Watzdorf et al. [23, 24, 251. The continuously formulated model can be solved efficiently with high com-positional information by the adaptive multigrid algorithm [31. In this work, the appn.mch of cone -tuous modeling has been applied to the refinery pro-cesses by implementing steam heating. The adaptive multigrid algorithm is used to solve the continuously formulated model. A steady-state flash and a distillation column are taken as example problems for the simulation.