Fouling Management of Thermal Cracking Units

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Abstract
Visbreakers and other thermal cracking units are thermal process units in crude oil refineries that upgrade heavy petroleum, usually residual oils produced from atmospheric or vacuum distillation of crude oil. The associated process streams of these units consist of heavy hydrocarbons with very high viscosities and impurities, resulting in fouling of the heat exchangers used to cool or heat these streams. This paper presents a practical fouling analysis for thermal cracking units in a refinery in Germany. Fouling management at this refinery was initiated as part of the refinery energy-saving program. Following similar analysis of the refinery's crude preheat trains, heat exchanger networks associated in the thermal cracking units were modeled by entering the plant monitoring data, network topology, and heat exchanger geometries into a commercial heat exchanger network simulator, SmartPM. Fouling behaviors of vacuum residue streams and thermal cracker residue streams were identified and quantified. Both chemical reaction fouling and particulate fouling mechanisms were identified to be responsible for the fouling in these streams. Dynamic fouling models were fitted and used to predict fouling of these heavy petroleum streams, which fouled on both the shell and tube sides of the shell-and-tube heat exchangers.

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