Investigation and Control of Fluidized Bed Catalytic Cracking Unit

Abstract

The fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) unit is one of the main units of the oil refinery, its objective is to upgrade heavy low-value petroleum streams into higher-value products, mainly gasoline and olefin. In this process the catalyst is circulated into the regenerator, the coke is burned, and the catalyst is regenerated. Many parameters are used to control FCC, the most important is temperature, which should be kept at (505C ) and the catalyst temperature (655 C). Other parameters are the level and flow rate of the catalyst. In this work, a control strategy was built and the transfer functions were detected, so, the characteristic equations were calculated as well as the open-loop transfer functions. Tuning, stability analysis and simulation response of the system were achieved by using Routh, direct substitution, RootLocus and bode methods