Numerical Simulation of an Industrial Fluid Catalytic Cracking Riser Available to Purchase

A three-dimensional multi-phase, multi-species, turbulent reacting flow computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was established to simulate fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) process inside an industrial FCC riser. FCC catalyst, oil, and air were used as the solid, liquid, and gas phases, respectively. A hybrid technique for coupling chemical kinetics and hydrodynamics computations was employed, where the simulation was divided into (a) reacting flow hydrodynamic simulation with a small but sufficient number of lumped reactions to compute flow filed properties and (b) and reacting flow hydrodynamics with many subspecies where complex chemical reactions occur. A four-lump kinetic model was used for the major species and a fourteen-lump kinetic model was used for the subspecies model. The results were validated against measurements from the actual riser.