Ultrasonic based instrumentation to monitor operation of crude oil desalter

该项目旨在开发基于超声波的仪器来监测原油脱盐的操作，在一个 炼油厂。脱盐装置除去炼油厂原料中的盐类杂质，以避免下游处理装置出现问题。这需要将原油与洗涤水混合，并将产生的油、水和乳状液的混合物分离成各自的相。由于油和水的强烈混合而产生的乳状相聚集在洗涤的油层和充满盐分的水层之间。设计和配置合理的仪表方案，可以避免乳状液进入脱盐油蒸汽和含油乳状液流入去盐洗涤水。由于这些装置困难的结垢条件和动态环境，工业已经确定了商业上可用的技术的局限性。基于类似系统的初步测试表明，基于超声波的仪器在这种具有挑战性的应用中显示出了良好的潜力。拟议的计划将允许进一步的测试和开发 这些努力应导致对原油脱盐器和其他工业过程中的类似装置进行更可靠和有力的监测和控制。这反过来应导致这种大型业务的更高效率和更好表现。

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.