The bottom of the distillation tower has no reboiler; it has a heating furnace and 5 kilograms of steam. Which one serves as the reboiler?
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I just switched to coal-to-oil production; I hadn’t been exposed to distillation towers before. While studying the distillation column diagram, I noticed that our plant does not use a bottom reboiler. The crude oil feed enters through a heater, where its temperature rises to around 355 degrees. There is also 5 kilograms of steam available at the bottom of the column, in a volume of about 2000 cubic feet. Which of these elements serves as the reboiler? I read on forums that since the oil is relatively heavy, a heater is needed to provide high temperatures; however, when I asked the employees working at our plant, they said that steam is the main means used for reboiling. I’m looking for an explanation! ! !
The temperature of 5 kilograms of steam is around 200 degrees, and it is primarily used for stripping.
The function of the reboiler is to provide the vapor phase in the stripping section for heat and mass transfer with the liquid phase. The few trays near the feed are generally referred to as the feed section, while the area below that is the stripping section. Your tower doesn’t have a reboiler, but there is steam at the bottom; it is the steam that provides the gas phase. So it should be steam.
It should be steam; the vapor generated by the steam acts as a stripping agent.
It is obvious that the furnace is heated, and the steam is used for stripping
It’s not called a distillation tower; it’s a stripping tower.
It should be a furnace; 5 kilograms of steam is not enough to generate heat for heavy oil. In MTP, the distillation towers for heavy oil use medium-pressure steam, with a pressure of 3.5 MPa and a temperature of 254 degrees
Just like the atmospheric distillation tower you mentioned, it is mainly steam that is used for reboiling, and the heating furnace is primarily used for preheating the raw material
When a heating furnace is used to heat raw materials, its outlet temperature should be below the boiling point of those materials; heating them to their vaporization temperature will cause vapor resistance in the furnace tubes, and in severe cases this can lead to the rupture of the furnace tubes