A Kinetics Lumped Model for VGO Catalytic Cracking in a Fluidized Bed Reactor

Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) is a process used to converted heavy petroleum products to light products such as gasoline, light fuel oil, and petroleum gas. In the fluid catalytic cracking reactor heavy gas oil is cracked into more valuable lighter hydrocarbon products. The reactor input is a mixture of hydrocarbons that makes the reaction kinetics very complicated due to the involved reactions. In this article, a four-lump model is proposed to describe the kinetics of vacuum gas-oil (VGO) cracking in the FCC process. This model is different from other models mainly in that the deposition rate of coke on catalyst can be predicted from gas-oil conversion and isolated from the C1-C4 gas yield. By this lumped model for the kinetic of cracking VGO we can also conclude that the C1-C4 gas yield increases with increasing reactor temperature, whereas the production of gasoline and coke decreases. We can also conclude that with decreasing space velocity the product yield will increase.