Abstract:
Modern day crude oil refining at a massive scale is the backbone of the global economy. This process provides fuel for transportation, domestic use and industrial heating uses and provides feedstock for several industries like the petrochemical industry. Millions of barrels of crude oil are refined every day across the globe to keep the world moving and advancing forward.
The crux of the process lies in the distillation unit of every refinery. This unit is responsible for separating the crude oil into the different fractional streams based on their different volatilities.
In a refinery, the crude oil must first be pretreated to remove corrosion and foul-causing components such as salt and water. Environmentally harmful chemicals like Sulfur must also be removed if the crude oil is sour in nature. The pretreatment process is followed by heating to raise its temperature and decrease the viscosity of the oil before it enters the distillation unit to be separated into the various compounds.
Despite the rigorous designing of the distillation unit, it is very difficult to produce separate components effectively with high purity. This is also the case with the NAPHTHA stream of the distillation column which contains lighter valuable compounds like LPG which become increasingly difficult and expensive to separate due to the high vapor pressure of the stream. This results in the loss of valuable LPG and a less pure NAPHTHA stream which is difficult to transport or use in feedstock.
The goal is to design a stabilizer which separately extracts the LPG from the NAPHTHA stream and stabilizes it in the process. This allows us to create an additional valuable stream of LPG for commercialization and utilize a stable NAPHTHA stream for the production of gasoline and petrochemical products.
