Dynamic modeling and simulation of steam cracking furnaces

The transient modeling of thermal cracking furnaces is developed. This representation is capable of describing and predicting the unsteady-state behavior of cracking furnaces during start-up. To accurately predict the heat transfer to the reactor tube, the fireside conditions are coupled with the process side. The mutual interaction of these two sections is found to be very stiff in terms of convergence of the computations. The two-dimensional transient zone model is developed for the radiative heat exchange calculation. A simplified model for the convection section is also used to predict the crossover temperature at each time increment. The main simulation outputs are the flue gas properties as well as the distributions of heat flux, refractory wall and coil skin temperatures versus time. The dynamic simulation is implemented for a conventional procedure used in the start-up run of the olefin furnaces.