Ali Shahmoradi - Department of Gas Engineering, Ahwaz Faculty of Petroleum, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahwaz, Iran
Mohammad Reza Khosravi-Nikou - Department of Gas Engineering, Ahwaz Faculty of Petroleum, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahwaz, Iran
Masoud Aghajani - BouAli Sina petrochemical company, Mahshahr, Iran
Ahmad Shariati - Department of Gas Engineering, Ahwaz Faculty of Petroleum, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahwaz, Iran
Shahram Saadi - Department of Gas Engineering, Ahwaz Faculty of Petroleum, Petroleum University of Technology, Ahwaz, Iran

In this research, a detail study for the systematic analysis, simulation and optimization of an industrial scale Eluxyl simulated moving bed (SMB) process by means of ASPENChromatography was performed. Two 4-zone and 5-zone models were implemented separately in the software to simulate the industrial scale BouAli Sina petrochemical SMB unit. It was found that 5-zone can predict the plant data in the reasonable manner. Finally, a dynamic optimization with Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) optimization algorithm was used to minimize the para diethylbenzene as desorbent consumption and optimizing operation condition. It was shown that the desorbent consumption which considered as objective function can be decreased to 4.03% and productivity increased to 3.90% without losing p-xylene purity in the final product.

Para-xylene – SMB – Eluxyl– Modeling – Optimization – SQP algorithm