Modelling and Economic Analysis of a Crude Oil Distillation System Using Aspen HYSYS

Abstract

This work was focused on applying Aspen HYSYS to model, simulate and economically analyse a system for distillation of crude oil. The chemical components involved in the model development were water, methane, ethane, propane, i-butane and n-butane and some hypothetical ones that were added using light ends and TBP data with liquid volume basis before adding an output blend. Peng-Robinson was chosen as the fluid package. In the simulation environment, the crude was heated from 450 – 650 °F in a furnace before being fed into the distillation column, which was set up using Refluxed Absorber Column Sub-Flowsheet. The column had 29 stages and was also operated with a partial condenser. The outlet streams of the column were off gas, wastewater, naphtha, kerosene, diesel, AGO and residue. The developed model was simulated to convergence. The good convergence obtained from the simulation carried out on the developed Aspen HYSYS model of the atmospheric distillation unit showed that it (Aspen HYSYS) was able to handle the simulation of this process successfully. The Aspen Process Economic Analyzer tool was used to carry out an economic analysis of the developed model, and this generated an investment analysis. Therefore, it has been shown that the developed Aspen HYSYS model of the crude distillation unit that has been developed in this research work can be used to represent, simulate and analyse the cost of an atmospheric distillation unit successfully for further studies such as the development and testing of a prototype of the system as a small-scale petroleum refinery plant.