Things happen in the heating train. Extremely high skin temperatures can cause potentially dangerous side reactions and unexpected particle generation in the oil. And feed filters aren’t always going to solve the problem. Our customer was running three reactors in parallel trains on their hydrocracker unit, processing 60,000 BBL/day gas oil feed, with an additional 20,000 BBL/day feed recycled from the effluent fractionator. Even though they had installed 5-micron feed filters, they were seeing 1,000-micron particles in the bed, causing pressure drop and temperature excursion issues.
In this case, the refiner wanted to run a comparison between our recommendation and the existing configuration. Reactors 1 and 3 were skimmed and loaded with six inches of CatTrap® inert filtration. Reactor 2 was skimmed and reloaded with the original material.
The graph above shows a comparison of all three reactors. In the two using Crystaphase, the customer saw a longer cycle length as well as increased activity and throughput—not to mention a lower risk of temperature excursion. All three reactors are now running with Crystaphase.
The shortest path to mitigating temperature excursion
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