Chemicals & Materials

Use of aviation fuel currently corresponds to 2-3% of the total fossil fuels used worldwide, or 13% of fossil fuel used in transportation fuel. Aviation fuel use is the second biggest sector after road transportation, which consumes 80 percent. Further, the aviation industry is expecting to grow at...

Fired heaters are in the refining and petroleum industry. In the current scenario, it is important to maximize fired heater efficiency to the maximum achievable. Revamping is a cost effective way to maximize fired heater efficiency: FIS has carried out several heater revamp projects in the past 5...

An Operator Training Simulator (OTS) of a new SUPERFLEXTM unit has been designed and built to provide highly realistic process and operations training to operators of a first of a kind petrochemicals plant. The OTS, which was delivered to Sasol in 2005, and otherwise called the Sasol Superflex OTS...

Near-infrared spectroscopy is now a well established technology for the indirect measurement of hydrocarbon streams composition and properties. From the earlier works and patents in late 80's, several industrial applications have been derived and implemented, mostly in the refining area but also in...

This tutorial will begin with a brief introduction to molecular sieves followed by a description of the process, covering overall operation of the charge gas dryer including adsorption and regeneration steps. Key design considerations will be discussed along with optimization and troubleshooting...

Economic forces continue to push the capacity of new grassroots crackers higher, and the capacity of cracking furnaces rises ever higher because of economies of scale. The trends in transfer line valve design have necessarily followed this same scale-up path, which has resulted in valves of...

Crude oil distillation accounts for a large fraction of the energy used in oil refining. Crude oil contains a variety of substances which tend to deposit as fouling layers in heat exchangers, and this results in decreased energy recovery and requires increased energy input to the furnace. CDU pre-...

This paper presents the economical benefits for a new radiant coil design which improves the performance of the thermal cracking furnace. The main drivers for this design are: increase of selectivity, capacity, run length, radiant coil lifetime or a combination of these. Cracking furnaces are the...

Hydrocarbon and other commodity prices are increasingly volatile due to factors which include speculation, reduced inventory and a lack of spare capacity. Energy prices are likely to trend higher as we replace depleted crude oil and natural gas fields and reduce emissions. In this environment...

There are many methods to tune PID controllers. This presentation provides a tutorial on tuning PID process controllers using Internal Model Control (IMC) concepts. This tuning methodology allows the user to “coordinate” the response of related controllers to optimize the process performance rather...