Abstract:

Residue hydrotreating process is an important technical route in the area of heavy oil processing. There are four types of reactors can be applied for a thermal cracking process of residue, fixed bed, boiling bed, slurry bed and moving bed. Among them slurry bed is more proper for treating the residue with high concentration of the impurities for the advantages of less use level of catalysts, low investment, regular flow inside the reactor and high heat transfer performance. There are also four types of slurry bed reactors can be satisfied with the demand of residue hydrotreating process, including bubble column, inner loop reactor, forced recycling reactor and outer loop reactor. In accordance with the development of a 50kt/a slurry bed residue hydrotreating unit, the comparisons of the flowing behaviors of both gas phase and slurry phase inside the four slurry bed reactors were carried out with CFD simulations by using Euler-Euler multiphase model. According to the flowing informations, like velocity, hold up and volume fraction of slurry phase, an optimal reactor was obtained to fit for a large residue hydrotreating unit.

Key words: residue, slurry bed, CFD, outer loop, Euler-Euler model