MaximaLabs
Back to gallery

CDU Process Flowsheets & Simulations

Explore 3 validated, solved CDU simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: naphtha, kerosene, diesel, residue, light_gas_oil, heavy_gas_oil. Open any one directly in your browser.

Solved via: PENG-ROBINSON.

Crude
crude
dist
cuts
btms
Qc
Qr
CDU
Naphtha
Kerosene
Diesel
Residue
Jamnagar, Gujarat, India

Crude distillation (preset cuts)

An atmospheric crude column fractionating a petroleum feed (naphtha → kerosene → diesel → residue) into ordered side cuts — refinery support via pseudos.

6 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

226 7

View & open
Crude
Washwater
hot
cold
hot
cold
Q out
HX1
Desalt MIX
Desalter
Brine
HX2
Fired Heater
crude
dist
cuts
btms
Qc
Qr
CDU
COND
vap
liq1
liq2
Reflux DRUM
GAS
Naphtha
SOUR Water
Steam1
Steam2
Steam3
liq
gas
gas
rich
Strip KERO
liq
gas
gas
rich
Strip LGO
liq
gas
gas
rich
Strip HGO
KERO
LGO
HGO
Strip Vent1
Strip Vent2
Strip Vent3
Residue
Port Arthur, Texas, USA

Crude distillation unit (full train)

A fuller atmospheric CDU: a crude/residue preheat exchanger, a desalter (wash water mixed in, then split off as brine), a fired heater, the multi-draw column, three steam side-strippers recovering kerosene / light gas oil / heavy gas oil, and an overhead condenser + three-phase reflux drum (fuel gas / naphtha / sour water). A pumparound heat-integration loop (drawing liquid off an interior stage, cooling it externally against crude, and returning it colder to preheat the column's own upper trays) was attempted — both a 2-loop and a 1-loop version — but proved too numerically expensive to converge in reasonable time and was dropped rather than shipped half-tuned; everything else in the reference PFD is real. From the ChemSep casebook (crude distillation).

27 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

223 3

View & open
Crude
Preflash
Light ENDS
Fired Heater
crude
dist
cuts
btms
Qc
Qr
CDU
Naphtha
Kerosene
Diesel
Residue
North Sea (Brent Blend), landed at Rotterdam, Netherlands

Brent Blend CDU (characterized from a real assay)

An atmospheric crude unit fed by a named, cited crude rather than invented pseudocomponents: Brent Blend (NOAA ADIOS oil EX00009, API 40.1, SG 0.8246, 0.35 wt% sulfur; the underlying assay is ExxonMobil's published Brent distillation curve). The bundled assay library (561 crudes, flowsim.backend.crude_assays) supplies the true-boiling-point curve; assay_to_pseudocomponents cuts it into 8 equal-volume pseudocomponents and characterizes each by Riazi-Daubert (Tc/Pc/MW from NBP + SG) and Edmister (acentric factor) — the eight cut_N entries below are that output verbatim, not hand-tuned numbers. The train is preflash drum → fired heater (660 K) → 20-stage atmospheric column with two side draws, yielding naphtha overhead, kerosene and diesel side cuts, and atmospheric residue. Three things worth knowing: (1) an assay reports one whole-crude gravity, but density rises steeply with boiling point, so the cuts are characterized at constant Watson K — Kw is fitted by requiring the cuts' volume-average SG to return the measured bulk 0.8246, giving Kw = 11.95 (the published paraffinic band is 11.4–12.1, which the fit was not tuned to hit) and per-cut gravities running 0.689 for the light naphtha to 0.971 for the 595 °C residue; (2) mole fractions follow from that — equal volume means mass ∝ SG, so each cut's mole fraction is proportional to SG/MW; (3) the column runs with rigorous_draws — real MESH liquid withdrawals — because the default carve mode (side products sliced out of a converged 2-product profile) returns two near-identical draws here and does not fractionate. Bounded: constant Kw is itself an idealization (a real crude's Kw drifts a few tenths across the barrel, and aromatic/naphthenic crudes differ), but it is the standard characterization and is strictly better than one gravity for every cut.

9 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON

106 0

View & open

Stop fighting legacy software. Build your first flowsheet in 60 seconds.