The Production Equipment of Atmospheric and Vacuum Distillation

The atmospheric and vacuum unit is a distillation unit for primary processing of crude oil.

It is a processing device that fractionates crude oil into gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil, wax oil, residual oil and other components.

Crude distillation generally includes two parts: atmospheric distillation and vacuum distillation.

a. Atmospheric distillation column

The so-called atmospheric distillation of crude oil is the distillation of crude oil at atmospheric pressure (or slightly higher than atmospheric pressure).The distillation equipment used is called crude oil atmospheric distillation column (or atmospheric column).

The heavy oil components left by atmospheric distillation have large molecular weight and high boiling point, and are easily decomposed at high temperature, which will deteriorate the distilled product and produce coke, destroying normal production. Therefore, in order to extract more light components, the boiling point range of the distilled feedstock oil is often reduced by reducing the distillation pressure. This distillation process under reduced pressure is called vacuum distillation.

b. Vacuum distillation column

   Vacuum distillation is a distillation process carried out under a negative pressure state with a pressure lower than 100KPa.The core equipment of vacuum distillation is the vacuum column and its vacuum system.

The vacuum equipment of the decompression tower is usually a steam ejector (also called a steam suction jet pump) or a mechanical vacuum pump. Among them, mechanical vacuum pumps are only used in some dry vacuum distillation columns and vacuum columns in small oil refineries, while steam ejectors are widely used.