Oct 2022
Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) is one of the major conversion technologies in the oil refinery industry. New developments in the availability of feed stocks, the quest to increase the use of renewable resources, as well as changes in the gasoline demand, result in a desire to improve the selectivity of FCC processes to petrochemicals. There have been industrial operations for boosting petrochemicals as a side product through the modification of reactors, as well as the optimization of operating conditions and catalyst formulations. As it will remain challenging to find a catalyst formulation with the activity fully adapted to the whole range of crude oil, extending the existing technology to whole crude oil fraction and propelling the direct petrochemicals production by short contact time under high catalyst-to-oil ratio trigger for new reactor configuration concepts. With one of the major problems in screening improved FCC catalysts from scaling down the commercial FCC processes with short residence time and rapid deactivation, several laboratory scale equipment have been designed from fixed bed operation to fluidized bed mode for better simulation of the industrial process.
In this presentation, I will give an overview of the industrial processes related to crude oil to petrochemical applications, and laboratory FCC catalyst screening equipment. Then, I will also present some of the crude oil to petrochemicals related work collaborated with Saudi Aramco under development by our group.
Mengmeng got her Bachelor and Doctoral degrees in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Southwest Petroleum University in 2011 and 2016, respectively. She served as an assistant research fellow and a managing editor of an English journal Petroleum at the same university until 2021. During this period, she joined the Multiscale Reaction Engineering group led by Pedro Castaño at KAUST in May 2020 as a Postdoctoral fellow, then was promoted as a research scientist in January 2022. She has published more than 20 papers with an h-index of 13. Her current research interests focus on computational particle fluid dynamic simulations with particle image velocimetry experiments to design, model, optimize, and scale up and down the catalytic reactors for crude oil to petrochemical applications.