IMPLEMENTACIÓN DE ESTRATEGIAS DE “PEOR-CASO” PARA EL CONTROL DE MEZCLADO DE CRUDOS

A. BLANCO, A. MORALES, A. BANDONI

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Congreso; AMIDIQ 2004; 2004

The main objective of blending two or more base crudes is to produce a mixture with intermediate properties and adequate for further processing or commercialization. The density of the mixture often constitutes the fundamental property for certain applications. The control of blending processes has been largely addressed by the scientific community for gasoline blending in refineries, mainly due to the economic impact of such processes. Far less work has been devoted to the control of crude blending where the property of interest is the density of the mixture. In those processes where there is no on-line measurement of density to feedback with regulatory purposes and it is necessary to satisfy contractual density standards for the mixtures, a “worst-case” optimization strategy represents a “conservative” solution which ensures quality satisfaction in the face of uncertainty. The purpose of this contribution is to study the implementation of “worst case” control strategies to the crude blending process where the property of interest is the density of the mixture.