Successful Launch of Wison’s First Digital Design Project

On 27 October, 2014, Xinjiang Dushanzi Tianli Industries’ 40,000 tons/year styrene plant designed by Wison Engineering began production of superior grade styrene, marking that Wison’s first digital design devise has successfully passed feeding and start-up tests and demonstrating that Wison Engineering has made a breakthrough in the process design of cracking by-products C8 and C9+.

Wison Engineering has undertaken basic design and detail design of the units, with functions that include C5+ feedstock separation, C8 separation and selective hydrogenation, styrene extraction and refining, C9+ separation and selective hydrogenation, as well as a steam condensate recovery unit and auxiliary facilities. With the design process taking less than nine months, Wison Engineering won praise from the client for building a perfectly designed project in a miraculously short time.

For this project, Wison Engineering independently completed the process package design for the C5+ feedstock separation, C9+ separation and selective hydrogenation and steam condensate recovery units. This process takes C5+, a by-product of the ethylene cracking unit, as feedstock, which is cut to produce C8 distillate. With advanced extractive distillation technology, the styrene from the ethylene cracking furnace can be extracted from C8 distillate to produce premium grade styrene. This process is a departure from the traditional oil cracking and hydrogenation process that not only produces additional high value styrene but also reduces hydrogen and energy consumption, allowing cost and investment savings for the large scale ethylene cracking unit and other benefits.