Design of 8.0Mt/a Atmospheric and Vacuum Distillation Unit

The design features of 8 Mt/a atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit (Ⅲ) in Zhenhai Refiningand Chemical Company are presented and various process schemes are compared. Production practice hasproved that the main process design is advanced and reasonable and the process parameters basicallyreached design requirements.

Heat Exchanger Network Retrofit for Optimization of Crude Distillation Unit Using Pinch Analysis

Crude distillation unit(CDU)is regarded as the main energy consumer in the entire refinery process.In this paper,the process simulation software and the energy management software are used to simulate the flowsheet and analyze the energy consumption,respectively.Stream data obtained from an existing CDU are applicable in the pinch analysis.To reduce the amount of cross-pinch heat transfer,three approaches of resequencing,repiping,and adding heat exchangers are adopted.Compared with the existing CDU,the results demonstrate that the inlet temperature of the furnace can be increased by 25.4℃,the amount of hot and cold utilities can be reduced by 15.1%and 19.6%,respectively.The economic evaluation indicates that the operating cost is saved by 8×106$/a,and the payback period is about 9 months.

A Multi-agent Artificial Immune Network Algorithm for the Tray Efficiency Estimation of Distillation Unit

Based on the immune mechanics and multi-agent technology, a multi-agent artificial immune network (Maopt-aiNet) algorithm is introduced. Maopt-aiNet makes use of the agent ability of sensing and acting to overcome premature problem, and combines the global and local search in the searching process. The performance of the proposed method is examined with 6 benchmark problems and compared with other well-known intelligent algorithms. The experiments show that Maopt-aiNet outperforms the other algorithms in these benchmark functions. Furthermore, Maopt-aiNet is applied to determine the Murphree efficiency of distillation column and satisfactory results are obtained.

Signed Directed Graph and Qualitative Trend Analysis Based Fault Diagnosis in Chemical Industry

In the past 30 years,signed directed graph(SDG) ,one of the qualitative simulation technologies,has been widely applied for chemical fault diagnosis.However,SDG based fault diagnosis,as any other qualitative method,has poor diagnostic resolution.In this paper,a new method that combines SDG with qualitative trend analysis(QTA) is presented to improve the resolution.In the method,a bidirectional inference algorithm based on assumption and verification is used to find all the possible fault causes and their corresponding consistent paths in the SDG model.Then an improved QTA algorithm is used to extract and analyze the trends of nodes on the consis-tent paths found in the previous step.New consistency rules based on qualitative trends are used to find the real causes from the candidate causes.The resolution can be improved.This method combines the completeness feature of SDG with the good diagnostic resolution feature of QTA.The implementation of SDG-QTA based fault diagno-sis is done using the integrated SDG modeling,inference and post-processing software platform.Its application is illustrated on an atmospheric distillation tower unit of a simulation platform.The result shows its good applicability and efficiency.