Dependence of visbroken residue viscosity and vacuum residue conversion in a commercial visbreaker unit on feedstock quality

Nine vacuum residual oils were characterized and eight blends of them were processed in the LUKOIL Neftohim Burgas commercial visbreaker unit. It was found that at constant content of about 8 vol.% of the fraction boiling up to 360 °C (diesel cut) in the visbroken residue the visbroken residue viscosity correlated with the vacuum residual oil visbreaker feed viscosity with a squared correlation coefficient R2 > 0.98. By application of correlation analysis and intercriteria analysis the vacuum residual oil feedstock parameters which have statistically meaningful impact on conversion to product boiling below 360 °C were found to be vacuum residual oil sulfur and hydrogen content, and solubility power of maltenes. The results obtained in this work are consistent with those obtained from other groups, even for other types of vacuum residue processing like ebullated bed hydrocracking. The vacuum residual oils which contained more resinous-asphaltenic materials formed more asphaltenes in the process of thermal conversion. The vacuum residual oil viscosity increment with increasing of asphaltene content for the straight run vacuum residual oils can be described by a second order polynomial. The secondary vacuum residual oils - the visbroken vacuum residual oils exhibited a lower than straight run residual oil dependence of the residue viscosity increment on increasing of the asphaltene content.