Grant: Alliance Grants

This research will be developed in partnership with Imperial Oil Canada, with the aim of improving FCC (fluidizing catalytic cracking) processes, in their refineries. The research approach proposed involves: a) The establishment of catalytic cracking kinetics using the catalysts and VGO (vacuum gas oil) provided by Imperial Oil, in the CREC Riser Simulator Mark II (RS) , b) The advancement of FPMs (First Principle Models) for large scale FCC units, using Barracuda CPFD (Computational Particle Fluid Dynamics), for the assessment of steady state and non steady state operations, c) The development of FPMs that account for both the FCC and catalyst regenerator units, d) The establishment of AI (Artificial Intelligence) models involving adjustable parameters, model trainers, FPM project data library and Imperial Oil operational data, e) The development of an engineer refinery operator easy to use, CREC-Hybrid AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithm in the Matlab/Python software. This project addresses technical and operational challenges faced nowadays by Imperial Oil refineries, as well as other refineries in North America. These issues are the result of rapid changes in the cost of VGO feedstocks, gasoline specifications, as well as the more stringent CO2 and other greenhouse gas targets set for Canadian FCC refineries. Thus, the CREC Riser Simulator together with AI training models for FCC will provide a unique platform to establish the best approaches to enhance the performance of FCC processes and VGO refinery operations worldwide.