Chemical Engineering May 2021 - 51

Gulf Coast 2021 Special Advertising Section
Optimizing crude oil distillation equipment: Sulzer's
separation technology supports even the most
ambitious refining process intensification projects
To remain competitive, businesses in the oil and gas sector should invest in technologies
that can help them improve processing performance while reducing production costs.
Choosing a reliable partner for cutting-edge mass transfer components, such as Sulzer
Chemtech, can help to significantly boost refining operations.
ulzer by Chemtech supports oil and gas companies in the downstream
sector by designing, manufacturing and installing highperforming,
state-of-the-art separation systems. The company's
comprehensive range of technologies increases equipment's service
life, column capacity and separation quality by tackling the biggest
operational issues in refineries. These include foam formation,
fouling caused by salt deposition or sand/catalyst particles, corrosion
and coke formation.
One of the most common issues in preflash columns is foaming.
Refineries can rely on Sulzer's innovative solutions, such as an Inlet
Cyclone or GIRZ, to mechanically control and break foam as it forms
without the use of chemicals. These cyclones are positioned on the
column inlet and utilize centrifugal force as well as the momentum
of the feed stream to separate its phases. As a result, the gaseous
phase is released from the top, while liquids accumulate at the bottom
of the device. This in turn reduces production costs and mainS
tenance
activities while improving product purity.
The Inlet Cyclone also plays a role in preventing fouling and corrosion
of the column. When combined with Sulzer's specialized column
trays and valves, refineries can further minimize these issues
as well as reduce coke settling. For example, special anti-fouling
valve trays, such as the VG AF, have excellent fouling resistance, increasing
the overall system reliability, while improving the column
performance.
As a full-service provider, Sulzer offers a wide range of dedicated
engineering services that can help refineries and petrochemical
complexes to optimize their processing activities and increase plant
productivity.
www.sulzer.com/en/applications/oil-gas-chemicals/
downstream/refining
The Future of Process Optimization is Here
S
ince 1988, Chemstations has been a recognized leader in chemical
process simulation software, and the company has continuously
improved CHEMCAD on both the software architecture and
chemical engineering functionality levels.
Hidden in every chemical process is money, improved efficiency,
and reduced environmental impact. To date, however, optimizing
even well-known processes is a daunting task. Using rigorous models,
reaching an optimum could take months or more of calculation
time. So, companies often cut back the number of variables in an
optimization, chose to use a non-rigorous model, or turned to custom-written,
fast-executing code. This means the tradeoffs are either
(1) having no idea whether a global optimum is found, or (2) spending
large sums of time and money to build custom optimizations.
Computing power has increased (Moore's Law) significantly since
the early days of process simulation. However, CPU clock speed isn't
the driving factor anymore; it's number of cores. The ability to parallelize
calculations to all the available CPU cores, as CHEMCAD NXT
can, is the key to running orders of magnitude faster than before.
Using CHEMCAD NXT's Simultaneous Modular SQP Optimizer
(which includes mixed integer variables), companies can build optimizations
right into simulations they are already using for their
work. Most chemical engineers are familiar with flowsheeting in a
simulator, and most also understand the principles of optimization.
Engineers also need confidence that the optimum found by the
model is the global optimum. CHEMCAD NXT handles this by parallelizing
a large number of starting positions. Multiple restarts are
performed until several solutions converge within set tolerances.
Therefore, CHEMCAD NXT's calculation speed increases the odds
of finding the global optimum in a reasonable amount of time and
each simulation run is extremely fast.
The improvement in run-time for a complex optimization is on
the order of 7X-10X faster from single-threaded to 6-core calculation.
Machines with more cores will give relatively similar performance
increases, depending on simulation complexity (less
complex simulations will reach a plateau in performance).
The CHEMCAD NXT team is working with customers on new and
exciting applications at all process scales, and the early feedback
is that (1) experts in process optimizations will be able to take on
more projects in a given time frame, and, possibly more importantly,
(2) even non-experts can tackle optimizations and feel comfortable
that the results are accurate and actionable.
Visit chemstations.com/NXT2 for a more detailed example.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM MAY 2021
51
http://www.sulzer.com/en/applications/oil-gas-chemicals/ http://www.chemstations.com/NXT2 http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering May 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering May 2021
