Computational Fluid Dynamic Modeling and Simulation of Hydrocracking of Vacuum Gas Oil in a Fixed-Bed Reactor

Davood Faraji; Samyar Zabihi; Mahdi Ghadiri; Sepehr Sadighi; Ali Taghvaie Nakhjiri; Saeed Shirazian

doi:10.1021/acsomega.0c01394

Computational Fluid Dynamic Modeling and Simulation of Hydrocracking of Vacuum Gas Oil in a Fixed-Bed Reactor

ACS Omega. 2020 Jun 26;5(27):16595-16601. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.0c01394. eCollection 2020 Jul 14.

Authors

Davood Faraji¹, Samyar Zabihi², Mahdi Ghadiri^{3

4}, Sepehr Sadighi⁵, Ali Taghvaie Nakhjiri⁶, Saeed Shirazian^{7

8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Process Engineering, Shazand-Arak Oil Refinery Company, Arak, Iran.
² Department of Process Engineering, Research and Development Department, Shazand-Arak Oil Refinery Company, Arak, Iran.
³ Informetrics Research Group, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
⁴ Faculty of Applied Sciences, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
⁵ Catalysis Development Technologies Division, Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI), West Side of Azadi Complex, Tehran, P. O. Box 1485733111, Iran.
⁶ Department of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
⁷ Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam.
⁸ The Faculty of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam.
⁹ Department of Chemical Sciences, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick V94 T9PX, Ireland.

Abstract

A four-lump computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model was proposed for the investigation of vacuum gas oil hydrocracking in a trickle-bed reactor. The experiment was conducted at 360-390 °C and 146 bar in the reactor at three different flow rates. It was found that the modeling predictions of vacuum gas oil cracking agreed well with the experimental measurements. Furthermore, the developed model analyzed the effects of the feed flow rate in the reactors on the concentration distribution and product yield. The maximum yields of the products including distillate (31%), naphtha (14%), and gas (3%) were obtained at the lowest feed flow rate. However, the feed flow rate enhancement from 0.1568 to 0.2059 kg·h^-1 led to the increasing feed concentration and reducing the product concentration at the outlet of the reactor. The latter phenomenon was happened due to the decreasing feed residence time with the increasing mass flow rate.