Petroleum refineries convert crude oil into petroleum products for use as fuels for transportation, heating, paving roads and generating electricity and as feedstocks for making chemicals. Refining breaks crude oil down into its various components, which are then selectively reconfigured into new products.
Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) is a type of secondary unit operation, primarily used to produce additional gasoline in the refining process. The process converts heavier, long-chain hydrocarbon fractions (such as heavy vacuum gas oils) into lighter, high value products. The rapid cracking reactions of the FCC unit rely on circulating a powder zeolite catalyst with the liquid feed into a riser of the FCC reactor. After the gas oil is cracked, the resulting effluent is processed in fractionators, which separate the effluent based on various boiling points into several intermediate products - including butane and lighter hydrocarbons, gasoline, light gas oil, heavy gas oil, and clarified slurry oil.
A refinery undergoing an expansion to increase the output of gasoline and other oil products recently selected Sundyne to provide pumping solutions for several critical services in the new FCC unit project. Sundyne integrally geared pumps are the preferred solution for low flow-high head applications because they offer the highest efficiency and reliability available.
Sundyne integrally geared API 610 OH6 pumps offer the following advantages:
- Simplicity of maintenance of a single stage pump that delivers the performance of a multistage pump.
- High reliability due to a robust and compact design
- High efficiency due to custom-sized hydraulics to match the Best Efficiency Point to the application conditions.
- Ease of rerate, should the process conditions change over time.
Below are pictures of several integrally geared LMV-322 pumps that will be used in this refinery.
