2017 Spring Meeting and 13th Global Congress on Process Safety

(156c) Effect of Additives on Thermal Cracking of Vacuum Residue

Authors

Cho, D. W. - Presenter, Korea Institute of Energy Research
Park, J. H., Korea Institute of Energy Research
Lee, S. H., Korea Institute of Energy Research
Vacuum residue (VR) is acquired from the bottom stage of the vacuum distillation unit which is located on the latter part of refinery process. After crude oil is passed through the oil refinery process, from 10 to 30 weight percent of crude oil is left as the vacuum residue. Vacuum residue has the poor fuel-property because of the high boiling point (over 758 K), high-viscosity, high contents of residual carbon, metals, and brimstone. Therefore, many research groups have an interest in developing various chemical process for getting the high-value added chemicals or fuels from vacuum residue, such as delayed coking and rapid thermal pyrolysis.

After the thermal cracking of vacuum residue, High impurity contents of cracked oil, such as sulfur, Ni, V, and ash, was produced. The cracked oil containing impurities should be passed through the heat exchanger and pre-heater in refinery process for the separation of production using physical properties, such as boiling point and solubility. However, the decline of heat exchanging efficiency appeared as time passed. Because solid deposit was accumulated on the inside of pipe lines.

In this study, the thermal cracking for the cracked oil production of lower impurity contents was conducted using the solid phase and liquid phase of additives. For studying the effect of additives and operating condition on the acquired liquid yield and the impurity contents of cracked oil, the experiment was conducted with changing operating condition. Several analysis apparatus, such as ICP-AES, XRF, and elementary analysis was used for measuring the contents of impurities.