Whitepapers

In today’s press, there is no shortage of theories pertaining to oil price and associated impacts to the market. For those who are confident in their oil price predictions, we wish you the best in your lucrative and early retirement. For everyone else, it’s not a matter of certainty, but a focus on playing the odds. In order to safely risk your money, it's important to understand the various scenarios and look for improvement strategies.

This white paper explains how oil, petrochemical, and chemical facilities have complex systems with many potential points of failure, even the smallest of which can increase cost and risk if left untended. In order to identify and improve weak points in a system, a methodology must be applied in a consistent manner. Six Sigma, DMAIC, is a data-driven improvement cycle that achieve measurable, reproducible results. By applying Six Sigma principles, areas of cost and risk can be identified and rectified.

This white paper series analyzes the challenges operation teams are facing and the solutions they can leverage to achieve an efficient and productive path to improved operations performance. Explore six approaches using technology and service innovations that can improve operational efficiencies and run your plant more efficiently.

The new Sequential Multi-Objective Optimization (SMO) technology available in Aspen DMC3 is a step change improvement over traditional APC optimizers. The new algorithm enables users to specify APC controller objectives thereby eliminating any LP cost tuning. In this whitepaper learn how advances in APC technology enables engineers to eliminate tuning workflows for the entire lifecycle of the controller.

In today’s competitive marketplace, more efficiently delivering capital projects throughout the project lifecycle can be the difference between profit and loss.

Discover how you can deliver both conceptual and detailed estimates in weeks instead of months and how this enables you to increase competitive edge and responsiveness.

Petro-chemical refiners are required to move crude oil great distances throughout the refining process. Crude oil contains various salts which can lead to corrosion or plugging at various stages in the equipment. Water wash is of-ten implemented to scrub the salts from the process stream to mitigate corrosion risks. Two modes of pipe degradation are addressed in this work: acid corrosion and erosion due to high wall shear stress. The primary focus of this study is to define the parameters with largest impact on the reduction of corrosion and erosion. Distribution of injected water wash and downstream behavior of the excess fluid are the focus of this investigation. This study builds on previous empirical and simulation studies of water wash techniques. A hydraulic spray and multiple quill style injectors were investigated with a nominally uniform cross-flow. These results demonstrate the trajectory change as well as the change in spray plume characteristics over a range of spray types and operating conditions, including counter-current and cross-current operation. The experimental results were acquired with a LaVision Laser Sheet Imaging (LSI) and an Artium Phase Doppler Interferometer (PDI), to measure the spray shape, size, distribution characteristics as well as droplet size and velocity. The spray simulations were conducted using ANSYS FLUENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package in conjunction with custom spray injection methods developed in-house. Experimental results are compared with the simulation results to indicate the amount of wash water that can be entrained to interact with the gas stream for corrosion mitigation.

Reducing turnaround duration can dramatically increase refinery profitability. Historically, cooling hydrotreater, hydrocracker, or reformer catalyst has often been on the critical path when maintenance was being performed on those units. This white paper will demonstrate an alternative approach to catalyst cooling that eliminates nitrogen injection and shortens the duration of this task.

Technology providers have been successful utilizing FCC Units to produce propylene by high severity operation, but gasoline yield has been neglected. New technology is being commercialized to separate the aromatics from gasoline to use them directly for downstream applications. Additionally, the olefin fraction can be converted into aromatics through a simple fixed-bed reaction system.