行业大牛总结：减粘裂化（Visbreaking）、灵活焦化、延迟焦化、流化焦化.pdfVIP

C H A P T E R S I X Thermal Cracking and Coking 6.1. Introduction Thermal cracking is the cracking of heavy residues under severe thermal conditions. The liquid products of this process are highly olefinic, aromatic and have high sulphur content. They require hydrogen treatment to improve their properties. Coking is the process of carbon rejection from the heavy residues producing lighter components lower in sulphur, since most of the sulphur is retained in the coke. The thermal treatment of hydrocarbons follows a free radical mechanism where cracking reactions take place in the initiation step. The reactions in the final step result in the formation of heavy fractions and products like coke. Reaction pathways of different fractions are expressed in Figure 6.1. There are three classes of industrial thermal cracking processes. The first is mild cracking (as in visbreaking) in which mild heating is applied to crack the residue just enough to lower its viscosity and also to produce some light products. The second process is delayed coking in which moderate thermal cracking converts the residue into lighter products, leaving coke behind. The third process involves severe thermal cracking: part of the coke is burned and used to heat the feed in the cracking reactor, as in fluid coking. In other version of the process, steam is used to gasify most of the coke (flexicoking). More detailed operating conditions about the three processes are given in Table 6.1 (Speight, 1991). The complexity of the mixtures that represent petroleum fractions and their vacuum residues makes the identification of the reaction pathways of individual hydrocarbon compound a very difficult task. 6.2. Coke Formation Coke can be formed from the condensation of polynuclear aromatics (such as n-butylnapthalene) as shown in equation (6.1) Fundamentals of Petroleum Refining