Condensate Refining

It's a pretty opened ended question. What products do you want and what other upgrading are you looking at? Is this going to a nearby refinery or are you selling it as bulk products?

You are likely going to want to first remove the C4s and lighter in a debutanizer. The next split would be between your naphtha and middle distillate which is likely to be around the 375F BP range. The naphtha could be subsequently separated into a light naphta (C5 and C6) that could be further upgraded in an isomerisation plant. The heavy naphtha would likely be sent to a reformer. The middle distillate would go off to diesel production.

And that's not even asking the question about sulfur handling issues, if any.

More specifics are going to get you better answers.

Dear TD2K,
My question is basically about the furnace and distillation tower for condensate fractionation. As the condensate have only 3% heavy material (heavier than middle distillate), what is the rule for designing the furnace and distillation tower. As you know, if the vapor percent in the furnace outlet is too high, the cracking of heavy material and coke formation will be high. On the other hand in distillation tower the vapor load in condensate refining is too high. What are the methods for economic design of such distillation towers (two in parallel and so on)?

Normally the feed to a lighht end tower is preheated by exchange with the bottom product and in some cases by steam or hot oil.

In most cases the feed is introduced into the tower partially vaporized. Knowing the enthalpy of the feed, the condenser duty and the enthalpy of the product streams, the reboiler duty can be calculated.

Good luck.

I worked on one cat gasoline splitter which had a fired reboiler. The boiling point range was quite narrow so controlling the outlet temperature as a way of how much heat was added wasn't practical (especially when you looked at the phase envelope with pressure changes).

The solution was that the reboiler was a pumped design. Firing was cascaded off a tray in the bottom section of the tower as a control point but essentially, the pump around flow was large enough you couldn't fire hard enough to go dry in the furnace. They did have high temperature trips on the pass outlets but with the composition changes and pressure effects, I don't think they could be relied on to ensure you weren't going dry.

Basically, you need to look at your system and come up with a control system to keep you from going dry if that's your concern. Since the latent heat is much more constant, you can have some sort of a firing limit based on the feed flow rate to ensure you don't go dry.

As 25362 pointed out, feed preheat is usually done by exchanging with some of your hot products but it really depends what you are going to do with those products. You definitely want to cool those products if they are going to storage and therefore that heat is available to preheat other streams but if they are going to another processing unit, cooling them down may not make sense but then again, it might. There's not sufficient information to really advise you here.

If this is something you are responsible for and not an engineering assignment, you really should consider hiring a consultant company. I don't mean to be harsh but you seem to be way out of your depth on trying to make these level of decisions.