Modelling and dynamic optimisation for optimal operation of industrial tubular reactor for propane cracking

Thermal cracking of propane in tubular reactors inside thermal cracking furnace will be the topic of this paper. The model is developed based on first principle and validated dynamically by comparing the simulated results against pilot plant data. This work is implemented in gPROMS^®. Process optimization was then applied to the operation of this tubular reactor. The effects of coking on reduction of production time and the decoking cost have been considered. Steady-state and dynamic optimizations were implemented respectively. The case study indicates that dynamic optimization can improve net profit by 10.6% compared with the base case. However, the computation required by dynamic optimization is much higher than steady-state optimization.