Determination of Suitable Operating Conditions of Fluid Catalytic Cracking Process by Application of Artificial Neural Network and Firefly Algorithm

摘要

Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) process is a vital unit to produce gasoline. In this research,a feed forward ANN model was developed and trained with industrial data to investigatethe effect of operating variables containing reactor temperature feed flow rate, the temperature ofthe top of the main column and the temperature of the bottom of the debutanizer tower on qualityand quantity of gasoline, LPG flow rate and process conversion. Eventually, validated ANN modeland firefly algorithm which is an evolutionary optimization algorithm were applied to optimize theoperating conditions. Three different optimization cases including maximization of RON (as theparameter which demonstrates the quality of the gasoline), gasoline flow rate and conversionwere investigated. In order to obtain the maximum level of targeted output variables, inlet reactortemperature, temperature of the top of the main column, temperature of the bottom of debutanizercolumn and feed flow rate should respectively set at 525,138, 169°C and 43000 bbl/day. Also,sensitivity analysis between the input and output variables were carried out to derive some effective ruleof-thumb to facilitate the operation of the process under unsteady state conditions. The result introducesa methodology to compensate for the negative effect of undesirable variation in some operating variablesby manipulating the others.