Iquitos Refinery implements Inline Blending System to optimize refinement of crude

PETROPERÚ launched the Online Mixing System for crude oil in the Primary Distillation Unit (PDU) of the Iquitos Refinery, in order to optimize the hydrocarbon refining process with a positive impact on the production process.

This automatic line mixing reduces the total time for the production of fuels, because the previous activities for the preparation of exclusive tanks to carry out said mixture will not be necessary.

With this new system, various equipment is used, such as pumps, control valves, Coriolis mass meters, which allow high precision in the measurement of crude oil density, as well as modern Distributed Process Systems (DCS) for online monitoring and automatic control. of the available crude mixtures.

In this sense, the precision in the automatic mixtures of different crude qualities is considered as benefits of this system, in order to obtain the optimal loads associated with the production objectives of the Iquitos Refinery in percentage and density, that is, the quality of the API.

Another benefit is the segregated storage of different types of crude oil (Los Angeles, Bretaña, Maynas or others) in the Iquitos Refinery tanks, freeing storage capacity of exclusive tanks for mixtures.

In addition, to minimize the accumulation of sediments and sludge at the bottom of the tanks and clogging in the plant's heat transfer systems, due to the presence of asphaltenes, which originate from the low compatibility of the crude oils when mixed in exclusive tanks.

It is worth mentioning that the old crude oil mixing system consisted of preparing a mixture of crude oils in a feeder mixing tank for its entry into the plant. This manual operation required inventory planning, tank preparation maneuvers, bottom draining and exclusive availability of tanks for each crude and a tank for this respective mixture, a procedure that did not allow the homogenization of the mixture to have an uniform API throughout the tank.

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