Two Phases, Three Runs

Premcor Port Arthur Refinery, part of the Premcor Refining Group has been expanding the capacity of a vacuum tower processing almost one million pounds per hour of heavy hydrocarbon feed. The feed is deficient in lighter, more volatile components and is extremely viscous at room temperature. The process is intended to squeeze as much useful fuel as practical out of the oil feed. During the past 5 years, CFD has become noticeably more widespread in solving single-phase flow problems, but progress in solving multiphase flows has been much slower. There are at least three primary solution methods currently available to solve a dispersed multiphase flow problem. The contract with Premcor called for the use of a Eulerian method. Later, as an in-house test, Flow Simulations studied the model of the tower using two other methods.