Simulation of Sarir crude oil refinery using aspen hysys

Abstract EN

Nowadays, distillation of crude oil is an essential process in almost all refineries.

crude distillation is the process of separating the hydrocarbons in crude oil based on their boiling point.

the crude oil fractioning is a very intensive complex process.

Such complexity was due to a large number of products, side stripper, and pump around which makes the task of evaluating oil refinery tedious.

In this study, a process simulation Aspen HYSYS (Version 11) is used at steady state operation to simulate an existing oil refinery in Sarir field for re-evaluation.

Sarir crude oil, used in this study, is processed in the Sarir refinery, which has a maximum capacity of 10,000 barrels per day.

Sarir crude oil is waxy crude which has a medium gravity of about 36.5 API°.

The Crude processed on the refinery produces Light Naphtha (LN), heavy naphtha (HN), kerosene, diesel, and residual (RES.).

this study aims to simulate existing units of the refinery process and proposes adding a unit before atmospheric distillation column (ADU) called “Pre-flash column".

the study involved the prediction of both temperature and pressure profiles through the atmospheric distillation unit (ADU).

detailed information was found for the temperature distribution of product cuts by ASTM-D86 curves for each product: light naphtha, heavy naphtha, kerosene, diesel, and Residual.

Simulated ASTM D86 curves were compared with laboratory data for each product except residual whose curves were not available.

the simulation results showed a good agreement with laboratory ASTM-D86 curves for all products except light naphtha, which revealed a noticeable difference.

Simulation results of production rates were compared with the actual refinery data.

the results of the flow rate of kerosene, diesel and residual showed noticeable differences from refinery plant data.

at the same time, a simulated total naphtha flow rate showed the lowest difference compared with the refinery plant data with a percentage error of about 0.3%.

the proposed pre-flash column showed an improvement in the furnace and the ADU energy consumption.