Title: A methodical study of reliability analysis of the crude oil unit in processing heavy oil

Authors: Qingyou Liu, Guorong Wang, Yan Yang

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir, Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, 8 Xindu Avenue, Xindu District, Chengdu City, Sichuan, 610500, P.R. China. ' State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir, Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, 8 Xindu Avenue, Xindu District, Chengdu City, Sichuan, 610500, P.R. China. ' State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir, Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, 8 Xindu Avenue, Xindu District, Chengdu City, Sichuan, 610500, P.R. China

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to analyse the safety and reliability issues on the crude oil unit in processing heavy oil. Based on the discussions of the corrosion mechanism, it uses fault tree analysis to identify the key factors that may lead to failure of crude oil unit when processing heavy oil. It has found that factors such as temperature, consistence, relatively move speed and material, critically affect the corrosion rate of the naphthenic acid. In order to explore the relationships between the identified factors and the corrosion rate of the naphthenic acid, this paper uses artificial neural networks to identify such normally non-linear relationships. Laboratory experiments have been conducted to collect data of the corrosion rate using different materials in different temperatures, consistence and velocity. The analyses show that the proposed research method is sound and can be used in safety and reliability analysis of crude oil unit in processing heavy oil.

Keywords: fault tree analysis; FTA; crude oil unit; reliability analysis; naphthenic acid corrosion; heavy oil processing; artificial neural networks; ANNs; safety.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2009.023257

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2009 Vol.4 No.1/2, pp.191 - 201

Published online: 15 Feb 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article