PD-11-04 Optimization Blend Operations Refinery Schwechat

Description:

OMV Refinery Schwechat applies state of the art inline blending facilities for gasoline, middle distillates and fuel oils. The facilities include online analytics, control and optimization systems. The purpose of the system enhancement was a further reduction of the production offsets towards the product specifications and thus ultimately a reduction of the quality giveaways in the product dispatch. The new operating mode was elaborated studying the blend optimization process, the precision of the online analytics and a flow analysis of the finished product tanks during in/out operation (simultaneous feed and product lifting). The results of the study are: •The product property limits set in the Inline Blending System in Schwechat are: in contrast to the Batch Blend process not single set points but rather upper and lower limits for product property control and allow: to adhere to the product specification with the same statistical certainty as attained using a traditional Batch Blending process •The mixing properties found in the finished product tanks are sufficient to allow equal property limit settings in an inline batch and an inline In/out operation •The precision of the online analytics is equivalent to the standardized laboratory methods These results enabled a more aggressive setting of property limits in the Blend Optimization and Control process and thus reduce the quality giveaway by ~50% compared to previous levels