Furnace Steam Injection

[hduncan8943]

Does anyone inject steam into their crude heater or vacuum heater for online decoking? I am looking for some guidelines on this. I have an old refinery engineering book that may have some rules of thumb, I am curious to current practices. We inject steam into one of our two crude heaters, but none of the vacuum heaters. We may have enough capacity on our overhead/jet system to allow this. Some of our heaters don't get decoked even during turn around. I have seen hot spots on our heater tubes at times which has limited us on charge rate. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

[0707]

In the past our crude and vacuum heaters were steam air decoked at controlled temperatures with co and co2 analysis. Nowadays the referred heaters are decoked with pigs.

Regards


Luis Marques

 

[hduncan8943]

I thought that I had a reference which used steam only. I did find a new BP technical practice which refers to the steam reaction with carbon producing CO2, CO, and hydrogen. I know that people do the wet steam-air decoking, but we would have to be offline to do this. I am just curious as to how much benefit I would see from steam injection alone. We do use steam injection in one of our small crude heaters.