Furnaces
Automate furnace controls to improve safety and energy efficiency
Furnace firing is the biggest single operating expense in any refinery. Consider a medium-size refinery (250,000 bpd) that consumes 2,000 MMBtu/h. At a cost of $5/MMBtu, that’s $87.6 MM/yr being ..
Micro-alloyed steel: New standard for reformer tubes
Reformer furnace tubes are designed to operate under high temperature and pressure. Historically, these tubes exhibit improved creep resistance at higher temperatures. The improvements in creep resist..
Improve the cracking of ethylene dichloride
The discovery and exploitation of shale gas in North America is providing a boost to the domestic petrochemical industry. In particular, commodity petrochemicals such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are e..
Case study: Service life assessment of boiler superheater tubes
Boilers are used in petrochemical facilities to generate steam that can be used to meet process and utility requirements. Many industrial boiler designs can be shop assembled and are therefore referre..
Inspect steam reformers and catalyst tubes with infrared thermography
Infrared thermography is a useful inspection tool to help locate problems in steam reformers while the units are online and fired. There are three main areas in a reformer that can be efficiently insp..
Decrease tube metal temperature in vacuum heaters
Various options for reducing the TMT of a vacuum heater, such as changing the transfer line size and adding extra surface area in the radiation and convection sections, are examined here. The best option generally depends on the limitations under which the heater operates with regard to the process requirements and the downstream equipment limitations and flexibility.
HP Innovations
ClearSign marks NOx reduction milestoneClearSign Combustion Corp. has cost-effectively reduced NOx to a record-setting 3 ppm. The results indicate that ClearSign’s technology may overcome many of..
HP Innovations
Burner management system ideal for retrofitsPrincipal Technology Inc. offers a modern burner management system (BMS) (Fig. 1) specifically designed for the retrofit of legacy boilers, ovens, furnaces ..
Improve pressure drop calculations for saturated water lines
When saturated water flows through pipes and components, it flashes—thus increasing its specific volume and limiting the fluid flowrate. Due to these conditions, the calculation and design for pi..
Achieve uniform heat flux in a coker furnace
A delayed coker unit thermally cracks vacuum residue (VR) and converts it into products like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), naphtha, gasoil and petroleum coke. A majority of the thermal cracking takes..
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- Green Fuels Operating breaks ground on $400-MM refinery in Oklahoma (U.S.) 6/1
- SABIC puts 141 lots of industrial assets up for public auction 6/1
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- bp sells 5% stake in Australian Browse LNG project to South Korea's GS Energy 6/1
