Browsing by Author "Shiskova I."

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    Experience in Processing Alternative Crude Oils to Replace Design Oil in the Refinery
    (2024-06-01) Stratiev D.; Shiskova I.; Toteva V.; Georgiev G.; Dinkov R.; Kolev I.; Petrov I.; Argirov G.; Bureva V.; Ribagin S.; Atanassov K.; Nenov S.; Sotirov S.; Nikolova R.; Veli A.
    A comprehensive investigation of a highly complex petroleum refinery (Nelson complexity index of 10.7) during the processing of 11 crude oils and an imported atmospheric residue replacing the design Urals crude oil was performed. Various laboratory oil tests were carried out to characterize both crude oils, and their fractions. The results of oil laboratory assays along with intercriteria and regression analyses were employed to find quantitative relations between crude oil mixture quality and refining unit performance. It was found that the acidity of petroleum cannot be judged by its total acid number, and acid crudes with lower than 0.5 mg KOH/g and low sulphur content required repeated caustic treatment enhancement and provoked increased corrosion rate and sodium contamination of the hydrocracking catalyst. Increased fouling in the H-Oil hydrocracker was observed during the transfer of design Urals crude oil to other petroleum crudes. The vacuum residues with higher sulphur, lower nitrogen contents, and a lower colloidal instability index provide a higher conversion rate and lower fouling rate in the H-Oil unit. The regression equations developed in this work allow quantitative assessment of the performance of crucial refining units like the H-Oil, fluid catalytic cracker, naphtha reformer, and gas oil hydrotreatment based on laboratory oil test results.
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    Feed Variability Effect on Performance of a Commercial Residue Hydrocracker
    (2025-11-01) Stratiev D.; Dinkov R.; Shiskova I.; Nedelchev A.; Kolev I.; Argirov G.; Sotirov S.; Sotirova E.; Bureva V.; Atanassov K.; Yordanov D.; Nenov S.; Stratiev D.
    Feed quality has been found to be related to both reactivity and sediment formation propensity in the residue hydrocracking process defining the conversion level. In this research, unlike other investigations, which examine hydrocrackability of individual vacuum residues, 529 mixtures of 33 vacuum residues were investigated for their hydrocrackability in a commercial H-Oil ebullated bed reactor unit. Intercriteria and regression analyses, together with singular value decomposition (SVD) and deep learning neural network techniques were employed to analyze data and model the vacuum residue conversion in the H-Oil unit. It was found that SVD model provided the best fit of H-Oil conversion training data (standard error of 0.95 wt.%). However, due to overfitting, the SVD model failed to predict H-Oil conversion on unseen data (standard error of 5.1 wt.%). The deep learning neural network exhibited standard error for all data (training, validation and testing) of 1.99 wt.%, while for the test data it was 2.35 wt.%. The linear regression model showed a standard error of 3.9 wt.% for the training data and 7.5 wt.% for the test data. Eleven properties of the vacuum residue (density, microcarbon residue, sulfur, nitrogen, saturate, aromatic, resin, C5-asphaltene, C7-asphaltene, Na, and Ni+V content) seem to be sufficiently informative for the purposes of modeling and predicting H-Oil conversion, thus enabling the assessment of the suitability of a given vacuum residue to be used as a feedstock for the H-Oil process. The best predicting model was found to be the deep learning neural network, which can be used for the purpose of the crude selection process.
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    Predicting Petroleum SARA Composition from Density, Sulfur Content, Flash Point, and Simulated Distillation Data Using Regression and Artificial Neural Network Techniques
    (2024-08-01) Shiskova I.; Stratiev D.; Sotirov S.; Sotirova E.; Dinkov R.; Kolev I.; Stratiev D.D.; Nenov S.; Ribagin S.; Atanassov K.; Yordanov D.; van den Berg F.
    The saturate, aromatic, resin, and asphaltene content in petroleum (SARA composition) provides valuable information about the chemical nature of oils, oil compatibility, colloidal stability, fouling potential, and other important aspects in petroleum chemistry and processing. For that reason, SARA composition data are important for petroleum engineering research and practice. Unfortunately, the results of SARA composition measurements reported by diverse laboratories are frequently very dissimilar and the development of a method to assign SARA composition from oil bulk properties is a question that deserves attention. Petroleum fluids with great variability of SARA composition were employed in this study to model their SARA fraction contents from their density, flash point, sulfur content, and simulated distillation characteristics. Three data mining techniques: intercriteria analysis, regression, and artificial neural networks (ANNs) were applied. It was found that the ANN models predicted with higher accuracy the contents of resins and asphaltenes, whereas the non-linear regression model predicted most accurately the saturate fraction content but with an accuracy that was lower than that reported in the literature regarding uncertainty of measurement. The aromatic content was poorly predicted by all investigated techniques, although the prediction of aromatic content was within the uncertainty of measurement. The performed study suggests that as well as the investigated properties, additional characteristics need to be explored to account for complex petroleum chemistry in order to improve the accuracy of SARA composition prognosis.