Modeling and Optimization of the Upgrading and Blending Operations of Oil Sands Bitumen

Abstract

A general framework is proposed for the operation optimization of a bitumen upgrading plant in the oil sands industry. On the basis of simulation results from an upgrading plant in an Aspen HYSYS environment, empirical models are developed through statistical analysis for different process units. Each generated correlation is a function of the relevant process unit operating conditions. All of the correlations are further used to develop the upgrading plant optimization model, which is a non-convex nonlinear optimization (NLP) problem. The proposed model is tested on three examples in which different commodity demands are imposed as constraints: (i) no restriction for production, (ii) sweet synthetic crude oil (SCO) production, and (iii) mandatory multiple production. Results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework for the upgrading plant operation optimization.

A Novel Numerical Model for Simulating the Quantity of Tailing Oil in the Mixed Segment between Two Batches in Product Pipelines

“…Effects of the difference in density and viscosity of adjacent oils on the diffusion coefficient[23][24][25].…”