Revamping Of The Alkali Washing And Alkaline Residue Oxidizing Unit Of Ethylene Plant

Ethylene is one of the most important fundamental raw materials in Petro-Chemical industry, which is the raw material to produce various organic chemicals and the three popular synthetic materials which are synthetic resin, synthetic fiber and synthetic rubber. The development of ethylene industry represents the level of petro-chemical industry of the whole country. The Ethylene Production Plant of Dushanzi Petro-Chemical, Branch Petro China Company Limited has applied the whole set technology of American Lummus Crest Inc. and the production capacity has reaches 220,000 T/a of ethylene.This paper studied the problems existed in the alkali washing system and alkaline residue oxidizing system of the ethylene plant of Dushanzi Petro-Chemical, and analyzed the fact of the increase of alkaline residue formed during alkali washing, the increase of the load of alkaline residue oxidizing unit, and the decrease of the products qualified rate caused by the changing of the raw material properties. In this paper, the effect factor of alkaline residue formation and treating method of ethylene plant was studied and the process revampment was applied to dealing with the bottle neck problem of this plant. The main study of this paper includes: explored and discussed the reaction mechanism of wet air oxidation to improve the efficiency of the alkaline residue oxidizing unit, carried out experiments of the alkaline residue formed in ethylene plant to detect the influence of the operation conditions on the effect of the alkaline residue oxidation, studied the mechanism of alkali washing system to detect the influence of process parameters on the grease formation, and to give specific revampment plan of the alkali washing system, alkaline residue pre-treating system and the oxidizing system. After finishing the revampment plan of the whole plant, the properties of products from the alkaline residue oxidizing system was analyzed and it showed that the design specification of the alkaline residue was achieved which means that the plant can meet the requirement of the environment protection and will reduce the pollution in the Dushanzi area.The study of this paper and the solution provided has directive meaning to reduce the grease and alkaline residue formed during ethylene production, increase the efficiency of alkaline residue oxidation, decrease environment pollution, and to guide the problem shooting of the same kind of alkaline residue oxidation unit of ethylene plant.