Open Access

ARTICLE

Kinetic Modeling of Light Naphtha Hydroisomerization in an Industrial Universal Oil Products Penex™ Unit

Ramzy S. Hamied¹, Zaidoon M. Shakor^2,*, Anfal H. Sadeiq¹, Adnan A. Abdul Razak², Ammar T. Khadim³

1 Department of Petroleum Technology, University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq
2 Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq
3 Midland Refineries Company, Al-Dura Refinery, Baghdad, Iraq

* Corresponding Author: Zaidoon M. Shakor. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Energy Resources in Iraq: Status & Future Prospects)

Energy Engineering 2023, 120(6), 1371-1386. https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2023.028441

Received 18 December 2022; Accepted 13 February 2023; Issue published 03 April 2023

Abstract

Recently, the isomerization of light naphtha has been increasingly significant in assisting refiners in meeting sternness specifications for gasoline. Isomerization process provides refiners with the advantage of reducing sulfur, olefin, and benzene in the gasoline basin without significantly victimizing the octane. The mathematical modeling of a chemical reaction is a critical tool due to it can used to optimize the experimental data to estimate the optimum operating conditions for industrial reactors. This paper describes light naphtha isomerization reactions over a Pt/Al₂O₃-Cl catalyst at the Al-Dura Oil Refinery (Baghdad, Iraq) using a newly developed universal mathematical model. The proposed kinetic model involves 117 isomerization reactions and 90 cracking reactions to describe 52 real components graded from methane to n-octane. A Genetic Algorithm stochastic optimization technique applied in MATLAB R2020a software was employed to estimate the optimal set of kinetic parameters. The calculated activation energies for hydrocracking reactions was found to be higher than the other reactions because of hydrocracking reactions occur at higher range of temperatures. By benchmarking between the experimental and theoretical results for all 117 data sets, the mean absolute error was obtained to be 0.00360 for all 52 components. Also, a positive effect of increasing reaction temperatures was recognized on enhancing the research octane number (RON).

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Keywords

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