Improvements in Petroleum Refinery Planning: 2. Case Studies

This paper is the second part of a series of two papers on the recent advances in petroleum refinery planning. In Part 1 (Guerra and Le Roux, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2011, DOI: 10.1021/ie200303m), nonlinear empirical process models for CDUs and a FCC unit were developed. The implementation of these models in two case studies for petroleum refinery planning is presented in this paper. In the first case, the empirical model for CDUs was implemented in the planning model for a small-scale refinery. In the second case, the empirical models for CDUs and a FCC unit were integrated in the planning model for a medium-scale refinery. In both case studies, empirical process models from the literature were adopted for refinery processes that were not considered in Part 1 of this work. In addition, a comparison of the computational performance for three popular nonlinear programming (NLP) solvers is presented in case study 1. The case studies showed that the empirical models developed in Part 1 of this work are computationally adequate for the petroleum refinery planning.