Professional Documents
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End point
Boiling range
Density
Viscosity
Flash point
At the Good Hope Refinery where I was the plant manager in 1984 we had
many other on-stream analyzers:
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diesel draw-off temperature as a guide to adjust the diesel draw-off rate. But
from the Control Engineers perspective, its not that simple. The diesel oil
95% point is a function of not only draw-off temperatures but also:
1. Tower pressure
2. The composition of the crude charge
3. The internal reflux on the trays
4. Tray fractionation efficiency
5. The percentage of lighter jet fuel components in the diesel oil
6. The ratio of steam to hydrocarbons at the diesel draw-off tray
7. The overall tower heat balance
I recall not too many months ago watching an excellent panel board operator
on a crude distillation unit at work in Lithuania. He had a modern 95% boiling
point analyzer that displayed its result on a strip chart recorder. The result was
updated on the strip chart every 5 minutes. Every 20 minutes or so this gentle-
man would glance at the strip chart. He would then adjust the diesel draw-off
controller. If the 95% point was above 650 F, he would close the valve by 1%.
If the 95% point was below 650 F, he would open the diesel draw-off valve
by 1%. The diesel oil was never at 650 F and 95%. It just wandered around
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the target. But it didnt matter. The diesel oil product was all mixed in a down-
stream storage vessel. My clients objective of maximizing diesel production
was being achieved by this manual control of the draw-off valve.
I happened to come back into the control room late that night. I had left
my reading glasses behind. The operators on the night shift did not know me.
I spoke no Lithuanian, they spoke no English. I watched the operators for an
hour, during which no adjustments were made to the diesel draw-off rate. The
operator did not check the online 95% point analyzer, even though it had
drifted down to 620 F. When I tapped on the strip chart to draw his attention
to the low 95% point, he opened the diesel draw-off valve by 10%. Rather
soon, the 95% point jumped to 690 F, which is extremely high and would
negatively impact the downstream hydro-desulfurizer catalyst.
The solution to this problem was to duplicate, via automatic closed-loop
analyzer control, what I had seen the excellent operator on the day shift do
manually. The result was quite satisfactory. Of course, analyzers are expensive
and require continuous maintenance by qualified craft personnel. Mathemati-
cal modeling is comparatively inexpensive, and no craft maintenance is needed.
Knowing the complexities of creating a representative computer model for a
distillation unit, I would prefer direct analyzer control of critical process vari-
ables such as the diesel draw rate. This gets back to one of Dr. Shinskys rules,
If you can run it on manual, then I can make it work in automatic. If it wont
work in manual, it cant be automated.
And, most importantly, the carryover of lean oil into the refinerys fuel gas
system was eliminated.
I was working for a small 9000 BSD asphalt refinery in San Francisco. This
plant produced a dozen different paving asphalt products. Each had its own
viscosity specification. The asphalt was produced from the bottom of a vacuum
distillation column, as shown in Figure 8-3. There were three parameters that
the operators used to control the viscosity of the paving asphalt:
variable affected the required amount of combustion air. The combustion air
was controlled by moving eight burner registers in the field, underneath the
heater. In practice, frequent changes in the heater outlet temperature resulted
in the outside operators leaving all eight air registers 100% open. This caused
a reduction in heater fuel efficiency due to the high oxygen content of the
heater flue gas.
The best option was changing the stripping steam rate at the bottom of the
vacuum column. This control modification had the advantages of:
The control valve was already on flow control on the panel board.
The effect on asphalt viscosity was very quick, that is, within 5 minutes.
There were no effects on the other areas of the process caused by altering
the bottom stripping steam rate.
meter into a closed-loop automatic control to the stripping steam flow control
valve. As before, valve position was changed by fixed increments, depending
on whether the paving asphalt viscosity was above or below the target speci-
fication for the particular grade of asphalt being produced.
One of the side benefits of this automated control of the product viscosity
was that the four operating shifts all started to use the same method to control
viscosity. Previously, some shifts had used temperature or vacuum or stripping
steam to meet the viscosity specifications. Now, all the operators relied on
variations of the bottoms stripping steam rate to make the appropriate grades
of paving asphalt.