Abstract

TARIFA, Enrique Eduardo et al. Flash distillation curve for petroleum fractions by using commercial simulators. Ing. Investig. [online]. 2008, vol.28, n.1, pp.50-56. ISSN 0120-5609.

This work describes a new method to estimate the equilibrium flash vaporization distillation curve (EFV) for petroleum fractions by using commercial simulators. To do that, a steady model for the flash distillation is implemented in a commercial simulator, and it is fitted by using a distillation curve obtained from standard laboratory analytical assay procedures. That curve can be one from many types, e.g. ASTM D86, D1160 or D2887; and it involves an experimental procedure simpler than that one required to obtain the EFV curve. For the simulation, any commercial simulator able to model petroleum can be used; the simulators HYSYS and CHEMCAD were used in this work. To evaluate the proposed method, several types of petroleum and fractions were analyzed experimentally. Then, according with the proposed method, those data were entered to a process simulator to estimate the corresponding EFV curves. The curves estimated by HYSYS and CHEMCAD were compared with those ones produced by two traditional methods for estimation: Edmister’s method and Maswell’s method. In all the cases, the curves estimated by simulation were close to the average curve of the Edmister and Maxwell curves. The proposed method has several advantages: 1) it avoids the necessity of obtaining experimentally the EFV curve; 2) it does not depend on the type of the experimental curve used to fit the model; 3) it enables the estimation for several pressures by using only one experimental curve as data.

Keywords : Petroleum; EVF; TBP; Simulation; HYSYS; CHEMCAD.

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