China's Ethylene Localization Has Made Historic Breakthrough

The history of China's large-scale ethylene process and equipment relies on imports will be rewritten. In mid-August, the largest domestically-produced ethylene project—the one-year anniversary of Wuhan’s 800,000-year ethylene production—achieves continuous safe and stable production with no plans to stop work, loss of ethylene plant, ethylene energy consumption, ethylene and diene The rate and other indicators have reached the advanced level of similar devices in China, indicating that China's self-developed large-scale ethylene complete sets of process technology and domestic ethylene core equipment have been successfully used, and historic breakthroughs have been made in large-scale domestic ethylene production in China.

Wuhan Ethylene is the first large-scale ethylene project using the large-scale ethylene process technology developed independently by Sinopec, and the first time to realize the ethylene production of all ethylene core equipment. After the large-scale ethylene projects in China were imported into overseas process technology, only three ethylene machines were used. One machine uses domestic equipment. In addition, the localization rate of ethylene equipment in Wuhan reached 87%, which is the largest ethylene project with the highest domestic equipment overall rate.

Ethylene process technology from the introduction to the digestion and absorption to independent innovation, China spent half a century. Ethylene process technology is one of the most technologically advanced and complex technologies in the petrochemical industry.

At the beginning of this century, the 800,000-ton/year ethylene process technology research project was established in the Ministry of Science and Technology and became the tenth research project of Sinopec. After painstaking efforts, experts from Sinopec have overcome key technologies such as cracking furnace SL--LM, low-energy gradual separation and quenching and viscosity reduction, and have independently developed large-scale ethylene technology with complete intellectual property rights, which has low energy consumption. With simple operation and stable product quality, it has reached the international advanced level.

In order to ensure the successful application of this technology for the first time, Sinopec took the overall situation and organized experts to demonstrate the safety and reliability of the technology package and solve various problems encountered in the application. Wuhan Ethylene strives to optimize its production during production. By optimizing the quality of raw materials and increasing the dilution ratio of the cracking furnace, the yield of diene is increased by 1.5%. By optimizing and adjusting the technological parameters of the carbon three hydrogenation reactor, the production of propylene is increased by 200 kg. hour.

Cracking gas compressors, ethylene refrigeration compressors, and propylene refrigeration compressors are commonly referred to as ethylene machines. They are the core equipment of the ethylene project. Failure of any one of these machines may cause the entire ethylene plant to be shut down. At the same time, the loss of equipment-wide production was as low as several tens of millions, and as much as 100 million yuan.

In order to make all three ethylene machines successful, the manufacturer's Shenyang Blower Factory held a swearing-off ceremony for thousands of people. Sinopec, Shenyang Blower Factory and Wuhan Ethylene respectively formed an expert team and held a monthly technical conference. Experts learned from the experience of large-scale ethylene “three machines” in China, and solved the cracking gas compressor reversal and high-pressure cylinder pressure test successively. Leakage and high bearing temperature, ethylene refrigeration compressor rotor deformation in extremely cold and other key technical problems. During the start-up period, Wuhan Ethylene Group's expert team tackled various types of equipment problems during the commissioning and start-up process. Through the efforts of all parties, the experts before the start of the work to solve a total of more than 200 ethylene three machine size problems.

After the start of construction, Wuhan Ethylene will focus on the maintenance of 14 key equipments, including three ethylene machines, record and report trend data on a daily basis, check equipment operation and maintenance every week, analyze and summarize equipment operation trends on a monthly basis, and have unfavorable trends. Equipment for preventive maintenance. In July of this year, the temperature of the ethylene cracked gas compressor increased in the fourth stage, affecting the stability of the unit. Wuhan ethylene decisively adopted water injection cooling measures to avoid equipment failure. In response to the equipment failures that have occurred, Wuhan Ethylene took repairs and restorations as soon as possible, and did not find out the cause of the failure, and the responsible person was not dealt with, and the relevant personnel had not been educated. Preventive measures are not in place and avoid repetitive equipment failures. Wuhan Ethylene also set up a special award for long-term operation of key equipment, and rewarded relevant personnel. After hard work, the failure rate of Wuhan's key equipment in ethylene decreased from 0.62% at the beginning of the year to 0.09% in June, and the sudden failure rate fell from 18.2% at the beginning of construction to 2.7% in June. Among them, the smooth running rate of ethylene three machines reached more than 98%, two machines in the two machines to achieve continuous and stable production for 11 months, a machine to achieve continuous and stable production for six months.

The successful use of key equipment for large-scale ethylene core has greatly encouraged domestic counterparts. Recently, the heads of four large-scale ethylene projects of China Coal, Sinochem Group and Sinopec have heard of Wenxu's investigation into ethylene in Wuhan. Two projects have decided to use domestically produced ethylene three machines, and the other two projects expressed the same intention. .