Fouling in refineries / by James G. Speight, PhD, DSc

Includes bibliographical references and index

Fouling in refineries is an important and ongoing problem that directly affects energy efficiency resulting in increased costs, production losses, and even unit shutdown, requiring costly expenditures to clean up equipment and return capacity to positive levels. This text addresses this common challenge for the hydrocarbon processing community within each unit of the refinery. As refineries today face a greater challenge of accepting harder to process heavier crudes and the ongoing flow of the lighter shale oil feedstocks, resulting in bigger challenges to balance product stability within their process equipment, this text seeks to inform all relative refinery personnel on how to monitor fouling, characterize the deposits, and follow available treatments. It will help users develop an analysis-based treatment and control strategy that empowers them to operate refinery equipment at a level that prevents fouling from occurring. -- Edited summary from book