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Safety‐Considered Proactive Flare Minimization Strategy under Ethylene Plant Upsets
Author(s) -
Yang X.,
Xu Q.,
Li K.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
chemical engineering and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 81
eISSN - 1521-4125
pISSN - 0930-7516
DOI - 10.1002/ceat.201000447
Subject(s) - overhead (engineering) , upset , process (computing) , process engineering , flare , engineering , environmental science , reliability engineering , computer science , mechanical engineering , aerospace engineering , electrical engineering , operating system
Ethylene plant upsets usually lead to flaring of off‐spec products, resulting in significant losses of raw material and energy as well as to air emission problems. Under the premise of plant safe operation, establishing process recycles connecting off‐spec streams to their upper‐stream process can help to reduce flaring during plant upsets. Operational strategies for recycling the potential flaring sources, i.e., effluents from the acetylene reactor and ethylene tower overhead, under various process upsets are developed and analyzed based on rigorous plant‐wide dynamic simulations. Safety considerations on the compressor system performance have been addressed by quantitative comparison of the effectiveness of various recycling strategies. Case studies demonstrate that the safety‐considered flare minimization strategies can proactively reduce the flaring emission amount and upset time and thus have great potentials of economical and environmental benefits to ethylene plants.