28/12/2011

Chemtech concludes project in partnership with ESSS

The office of Chemtech in Natal concluded, in September, a project totally new in the company: the Studies for the Drainage and Transport of AR (atmospheric residue) for the Potiguar Refinery Clara Camarão (RPCC). The project, which has a more conceptual nature, was developed in a partnership with ESSS, a company of software engineering for scientific simulation.

The project’s objective was to evaluate if the pumps that currently transfer oil could be used for the pumping of atmospheric residue, AR. The difficulty in pumping AR lies in the fact that, below ambient temperature, this product solidifies in the ducts, demanding special conditions to be pumped. Chemtech has taken care of the entire interface and technical coordination between ESSS and RPCC, from the boundary conditions definitions, which were used as assumptions in the simulations, to the presentation of the results to the clients.

“The commercialization of AR as bunker oil at RPCC can significantly increase the annual revenue of the unit. The results presented were an important step to reach this future increase, justifying even more the profitability of this refinery in the Petrobras system,” explains the process engineer Gildson Bastos, responsible for the coordination of the project.

Chemtech’s manager in Natal, Wildson Reis points out that the result was great and the clients were more than satisfied. “We were very assertive in the solutions, we finished within the deadline and reached the objective with extreme success,” he says.