Burton process processes

The first commercial Tube-and-Tank cracking plant came on line in 1922. Overall, compared to the Burton Process, the Tube-and-Tank Process allowed larger volumes of petroleum to be processed under conditions of intense cracking and longer production cycles. 

By the early 1930s, thermal cracking had achieved a fairly high level of operation. Both the Dubbs (UOP) and Tube-and-Tank (Jersey Standard) Processes represented the state of the art in the field. Between the end of World War I, when the Burton Process was still revolutionary, and the early 1930s, octane ratings of gasoline increased 36 percent. This improvement resulted from the existence of more advanced thermal plants and the increasing use of additives, espe-... 

Bursting strength, of paper, 18 100-101 Burton process, 18 648 Busheling scrap, 21 408-409 Bushveld Igneous Complex, 19 604 Business form inks, 14 321 Business R D expenditures, 21 612. 

Thermal cracking or pyrolysis, the oldest of the these processes,1 was first carried out by Burton2 in his treatment of the residue remaining from the distillation of volatile components (so-called straight-run gasoline) of oil. The residue was treated in a horizontal drum by heating to 450-550°C under 5-6 atm. The volatile components were distilled off continuously until only coke remained in the still. The Burton process was supplanted by the continuous Dubbs process Operating... 

Burton process an older thermal cracking process in which oil was cracked in a pressure still and any condensation of the products of cracking also took place under pressure. 

The first synthetic indigo was produced in 1917. Until the development of the Burton process for cracking hydrocarbons in 1913, the petroleum industry had been confined to separating from the crude the... 

The Burton process is usually viewed as the first great advance in petroleum cracking over those adapted from coal tar cracking. The major advance introduced in this process was the feature of conducting the cracking at elevated pressures and the significant increase in gasoline yield (/). 

A schematic of the Burton process that incorporates advances introduced by Humphreys and the Lewis-Cooke bubble tower is shown in Figure 1. This process operated on the batch principle. Within a short time, many Indiana Standard employees made improvements to the design of the first process. However, all of these advances were nearly for naught. The directors of the... 

After a few years of commercial operation with the Burton Process, E. M. Clark, superintendent of one of the refineries, made a very important improvement. Using gravity to transport heavy liquid since a pump was not available that could pump heavy hot petroleum, Clark developed a modification to allow semi-continuous processing, resulting in a significant improvement in transportation fuel yield (Figure 2). 

As word spread of the success of the Burton process, demand for licensing developed from many refiners. By 1920, Indiana Standard was reaping "the greatest windfall in the history of petroleum refining", at least up to that time (/). 

The development of the process would not have been possible without making significant improvements in the hardware (7). Electrical welding was introduced a decade after the Burton process. Thus, the first stills had to be constructed of riveted steel plates, and they frequently burst at the seams. They also tended to leak at the seams and the escaping vapors would ignite fortunately the coke deposits that formed with time on-stream tended to plug the leaks as the still was used. Pumps that could handle hot oil safely were still to be developed. 

Potential competing processes existed in 1912, and more arose very quickly. Two dominant alternatives to the Burton process were the Dubbs and the Holmes-Manley thermal processes and two similar catalytic processes advanced by the Texas Company (Texaco) and by Gulf Refining (Gulf and Texaco are now incorporated into Chevron). 

The Burton Process 1913-1920. Two of the early problems with the batch process were the poor yield of gasoline (8.4 gallons from a 42-gallon barrel of crude oil) and the residuum that was left over after each run. Early technicians were required to climb into the vessels and chip it out by hand. This procedure was dangerous, inefficient, difficult, costly, and time consuming. 

In the Burton process (Figure 1-3), process technicians charged the vessel with 200 barrels of crude oil and slowly heated it to 700° F. 

Standard Oil of Indiana (now BP) commercializes the Burton process for delayed coking at Whiting, Indiana. 

In 1914, Jesse A. Dubbs and J. Ogden Armour founded the National Hydrocarbon Company, which later became Universal Oil Products (UOP). ° UOP grew to become the world s largest licensor of process technology for the oil refining industry. In 1919, UOP commercialized the Dubbs process, which solved some of the problems associated with the Burton-Humphreys process. The Dubbs process produced fewer coke deposits, it could process heavier petroleum fractions, and it ran longer between shutdowns. 

The liquid-phase cracking processes were the first to be commercially applied, and the Burton process was the first to be practiced on a large scale. Development began in 1910 a patent was issued in 1912 recognition of Dr. Burton by the Willard Gibbs Medal was given in 1918 and by 1921 over 800 Burton stills were said to be in operation. Other early liquid-phase processes were the Fleming, Isom, and Emerson processes. 

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