Modelagem e simulação do processo de produção de gasolina utilizando o modelo cinético de 10 lumps.

Abstract

The Fluidized Catalytic Cracking (FCC) is an industrial process which converts heavy hydrocarbons into lower weight molecular products in riser reactors. In this study, we performed numerical simulations o f two-phase flow (catalytic converter and gasoil) through a riser, using the commercial computational fluid dynamics package CFX 12.0. Conservation equations of mass, time and energy for each phase were solved using the finite volume numerical method. The 10 lumps kinetic model was used to predict the reactions of catalytic cracking. The gasoline lump as well as the coke lump (light + coke) mass fractions calculated at the exit of the application showed good agreement with the available experimental data. The gasoline lump presented a mass fraction of 0.4254 in the exit. Based on the results of the simulations, we were able to determine profiles of concentration, speed and pressure in the riser reasonably similar to those reported in the literature, what indicates that the model used was adequate in order to estimate the physics of a two-stage problem in an FCC riser.