Ultrasonic based instrumentation to monitor operation of crude oil desalter

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The project aims at developing ultrasonic based instrumentation to monitor operation of crude oil desalter, in a petroleum refinery. The desalter unit removes impurities of salts in the feed to petroleum refinery to avoid problems in the down stream processing units. This requires mixing the crude oil with wash water and separating the resulting mixture of oil, water and emulsion into respective phases. The emulsion phase created as a result of intense mixing of oil and water collects in between the washed oil layer and salt-laden aqueous layer. A properly designed and configured instrumentation scheme can avoid ingress of emulsion into desalted oil steam and loss of oil-containing emulsion into decanted wash water. Limitations of commercially available techniques have been identified by the industry due to difficult fouling conditions and dynamic environment of these units. Ultrasonic based instrumentation have shown good potential for such challenging applications based on initial testing with similar systems. The proposed program will allow further testing and development efforts which should lead to a more reliable and robust monitoring and control of crude oil desalters and similar units in other industrial processes. This in turn should lead to improved efficiency and better performance of such large operations.