Role of Liquid Saturation in Coke Yield from Model Vacuum Residue-Coke Agglomerates

• Author / Creator

  Kumar, Deepesh

• The fluid coking process is an example of upgrading processes that use hot solids to heat and crack bitumen into more valuable products. When liquid is sprayed into a fluid bed of hot solids, the solids tend to agglomerate. The reactions in these agglomerates are subject to complex heating, reaction, and disintegration processes. The behaviour of bitumen derived feeds, and mixtures of these feeds with fluid coke particles, was investigated by heating them in Curie point reactors in an induction furnace up to 530 °C. Small scale reactors of different geometries were fabricated from Curie point alloy to test dependence of mixture behaviour on different parameters. The yield of coke was measured as a function of the ratio of liquid to solid, heating rate, thickness of mixtures and feed type in reactors with machined wells. Coke yield increased with the fraction of bitumen feed. Coke yields were insensitive to heating rates from 5 to 120 °C per second and mixture thicknesses, at a constant final temperature. Bubbling was observed as the ratio of feed in the mixture was raised above a certain threshold, depending on the kind of feed used. Bubbling was found to increase with greater heating rates, but it had little effect on ultimate coke yield. Putting bitumen feeds in a reactor with micro channels machined into it showed the high intensity of bubbling they underwent during cracking. A Curie point reactor was also used to test for the formation of skin on surface of mixtures. No evidence of skin formation was found in the subsequent experiments. The coke yield and bubbling trends observed with varying fluid coke ratios, different feeds, and with multiple heating rates, gives insights for improvement of reactor performance by designing better feed systems for the fluid cokers.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Coke yields
  • Liquid saturation in coke agglomerates
  • Inductive heating

• Graduation date

  Spring 2015

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R38S4JW1J

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.