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，以监测炼油厂原油脱盐装置的运行。脱盐装置去除炼油厂进料中的盐杂质，以避免下游加工装置出现问题。这需要将原油与洗涤水混合，并将所得的油、水和乳液的混合物分离成相应的相。由于油和水的强烈混合而产生的乳液相聚集在洗涤的油层和含盐的水层之间。适当设计和配置的仪表方案可以避免乳化液进入脱盐油蒸汽和含油乳化液损失到倾析的洗涤水中。由于这些装置的困难的结垢条件和动态环境，工业上已经确定了市售技术的局限性。基于超声波的仪器已经显示出良好的潜力，这种具有挑战性的应用程序的基础上，初步测试与类似的系统。拟议的计划将允许进一步的测试和开发，这将导致更可靠和强大的监测和控制原油脱盐和类似的单位在其他工业过程。这反过来又会提高此类大型行动的效率和业绩。

The project aims at developing ultrasonic based instrumentation to monitor operation of crude oil desalter, in apetroleum 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 developmentefforts 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.