SIMULATION AND KINETIC MODELING OF VACUUM RESIDUE SOAKER-VISBREAKING

In a refinery visbreaking is a complementary process to upgrade vacuum residue or bottom of barrelsto the more precious stocks such as the fuel oil and gasoline. In this present work, visbreaking of vacuumresidue in a commercial soaker-visbreaking plant is studied. The product of the visbreaking furnace ischaracterized to the light gas (C1, C2), LPG (C3, C4), gasoline (IBP-180oC), gas oil (180-320oC) and fuel(320+oC). Afterwards to model the visbreaking process, a six-lump kinetic network with fifteen reactions andthirty kinetic parameters is developed. In this model, visbreaking furnace is modeled as a equal distributedheater whilst the soaker is modeled as a complete stirred tank reactor. After evaluating the rate ofreactions by estimated kinetic parameters, it is confirmed that a reduced reaction network with sevenreaction paths and fourteen kinetic parameters is appropriate to simulate the performance of the reactorwith the same accuracy as complete network, which results the final AAD% of the model to 4.75%.