Environment & Safety Gas Processing/LNG Maintenance & Reliability Petrochemicals Process Control Process Optimization Project Management Refining

Furnaces

Improve the cracking of ethylene dichloride

Linde Engineering North America, Inc.: Shahani, G.  |  Ma, D.

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

SABIC Technology Centre: van Zyl, G.  |  Al-Meshari, A.  |  Al-Shahrani, S.

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

Thermal Diagnostics: James, S.

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

Saudi Aramco: Bright, E.  |  Roy, S.  |  Ramaseshan, V.

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

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Blume, Adrienne

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

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Blume, Adrienne

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

Reliance Industries Ltd.: Patil, R.  |  Mishra, V. P.  |  Das, A. K.

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..

Enhance refinery profitability with modeling innovations

Aspen Technology Inc.: Beck, R.  |  Ajikutira, D.  |  Herrmann, L.  |  Ye, V.

Several improvements are on the horizon, which will add powerful optimization capabilities into the process modeler’s simulation work space in areas like heat integration, column optimization and economics.

Optimize amine units and improve refinery profitability

GE Water & Process Technologies: Zurlo, J.

The alkanolamine system in a refinery, better known as the amine unit, is used to remove hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) and mercaptans (collectively referred to as acid gases) from proce..