Thermal cracking of petroleum residue oil using three level factorial design

Thermal cracking of petroleum residue oil was conducted in a high-pressure batch reactor under various operating conditions, temperature in range 400–480 °C, reaction time 40–100 min and pressure 120–180 kPa in the presence of hydrogen. Statistical design of experiment (DOE) was used to evaluate the effect of important variables in the thermal cracking of residue oil, and to obtain the optimum operating conditions. Based on the three level factorial design, quadratic model was developed to correlate the thermal cracking variables to total conversion and linear models for yields of total distillate fuels, gasoline, kerosene and diesel. From the analysis of variance (ANOVA), the most influential factor on each experimental design response was identified. The predicted conversion and yields of total distillate fuels, gasoline, kerosene and diesel were found to agree satisfactorily with the experimental values.