Optimal Production Synthesis of Liquefied Petroleum Gas in a Debutanizer Tower

Paulo Padrão¹; Fábio Coelho¹; Felipe Campelo¹

¹ Instituto Federal Fluminense

doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-1439

Resumo

The liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is produced in a distillation column comprising a set of peripheral instruments. This tower, also known as debutanizer tower, is responsible for separating LPG from the other components by means of the variation of the temperature profile. Brazilian National Agency of Petroleum (ANP) regulates the specifications of LPG so that it can be commercialized. Currently the gas specification process is done manually through a standardized test called weathering test, which is performed in a few hours. During the sample test range, a large volume of gas is processed generating losses for the client or company depending on the specification of the processed gas. This study aims to suggest the implementation of a control strategy to optimize the production of LPG in order to decrease the chances of losses and reprocessing gas. In order to ease optimization procedure and solve the optimization problem, an Optimization Graphical User Interface (Op-GUI, an optimization tool under development at the Mechatronics and Signal Processing Laboratory, Instituto Federal Fluminense) is used to execute numerical optimization through MATLAB algorithms while meeting performance objectives

Palavras-chave: LPG Loss Reduction; Debutanizer Tower; Weathering Test; Optimal Production of LPG