Flushing oil pipelines during product changeovers is a critical process in lube oil processing facilities to ensure the final product's quality and purity.his flushing operation results in large volumes of comingled products that are not packaged and sold at the high value of the pure products. So not only is there a financial loss, but the comingled oil product is not packaged which lowers the product yield. To reduce both the financial and material loss an innovative approach to optimizing this process is required.

We have conducted a limited number of studies at the industrial plant, but need more data to optimize this process. These industrial studies were found to be both time-consuming and labor-intensive for an operating lube facility. It was found that these studies required substantial changes to the operating procedures in the plants and also resulted in excess downtime at the plant. To address these issues, a laboratory-scale pilot plant was designed and built to study and optimize the flushing process.

A comprehensive review of lube oil properties, pipeline operations and flushing processes in the lube oil industry will be studied with the pilot plant. Using the pilot plant, we are able to study the mixing of a residual oil with a flushing oil in a pipeline system. The pilot plant has been designed at a geometry ratio of 1/5 of the industrial plant. The flowrates in the pilot plant are based on matching the Reynold’s numbers of the industrial plant. One advantage of the pilot plant is that we are able to vary the flowrate of the oil in the system using a positive displacement pump with a variable speed drive. This allows us to examine flows of identical Reynolds numbers to the industrial plant and examine an extended operating range of these flowrates (Scoffoni et al., 2001; Wang et al., 2011).

With this pilot plant we can not only obtain fluid samples and measure kinematic viscosity, similar to the industrial plant, but we also have added an online measurement of the viscosity. We are also able to examine various pipeline system configurations with the pilot plant. This includes alternative filters, fittings and piping. Also, in this pilot plant we have studied pipeline coatings to determine if they will reduce the amount of residual oil that needs to be flushed. The research findings from this pilot plant are providing valuable data that are being used to formulate a model of this process.

The bench-scale pilot plant provides a valuable tool for studying the flushing of oil pipelines during product changeovers in lube oil processing facilities. The novel approach will aid in the validation of models and the optimization of the flushing process, resulting in increased efficiency and product quality. The ability of the pilot plant to simulate industrial flush operations on a smaller scale provides a cost-effective and efficient solution for studying and optimizing the process while reducing the need for excessive operator time and plant visits.

REFERENCES

Scoffoni, J., Lajeunesse, E., Homsy, G.M., 2001. Interface instabilities during displacements of two miscible fluids in a vertical pipe. Phys. Fluids 13, 553–556. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1343907

Wang, S., Huang, X., Yang, C., 2011. Mixing enhancement for high viscous fluids in a microfluidic chamber. Lab. Chip 11, 2081–2087. https://doi.org/10.1039/C0LC00695E