ACADEMIA

Fluent Inc., the world leader in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and services, announced that it has teamed with KBC Advanced Technologies Inc. to provide high end engineering solutions to oil refineries and petrochemical manufacturers. Joint service offerings will focus on improving unit operating performance, reducing operating costs, increasing system reliability, safety enhancement, and pollution reduction. "We're excited about this partnership," said Dave Schowalter, Lead Engineer for Energy at Fluent. "By teaming KBC's 25 years of experience optimizing unit and refining processes with Fluent's 25 years of advanced flow simulation, we're able to help refineries increase processing efficiency by visualizing what is going wrong with their units, then proposing, proving, and providing real engineering solutions." "Using Fluent's CFD program we were able to perform a low cost redesign of the inlet distributor and feed collector piping for a hydrotreater reactor allowing us to dramatically increase catalyst loading and catalyst contacting, while preventing bed channeling" said Rob Tufts, a Principal Consultant for KBC. Addressing rapidly increasing demand for transport fuels and other crude oil derivatives, environmental restrictions calling for low sulfur fuels, emission limits on refineries, and the fact new oil refineries have not been built in the United States for more than 20 years, KBC and Fluent are uniquely positioned to address a wide range of challenges faced by refiners. The companies are helping refiners find new ways to fully utilize and improve yields, reduce risk and increase the throughput of existing processing units. KBC and Fluent have created a methodology for identifying vulnerable components within refineries and have already worked with several refiners and identified many problem areas, thereby reducing the risk of accident, injury to workers and otherwise costly failures. Erosion prediction was one of the early targets of the partnership, while another area was unit operation trouble shooting and hydrotreater reactor optimization. Other applications being addressed by the partnership include eliminating bottlenecking in fired heaters, improving fractionation in distillation towers, and improving the operation of separation systems.