Types Of Refinery

A refinery is a production facility composed of a group of chemical engineering unit processes and unit operations used for refining certain materials or converting raw material into products of value.

The various types of refineries include:

Oil refinery: Converts petroleum crude oil into high-octane motor fuel (gasoline/petrol), diesel oil, liquefied petroleum gases (LPG), jet aircraft fuel, kerosene, heating fuel oils, lubricating oils, asphalt and petroleum coke.

Sugar refinery: Converts sugar cane and sugar beets into crystallized sugar and sugar syrups.

Natural gas processing plant: Purifies and converts raw natural gas into residential, commercial and industrial fuel gas, and also recovers natural gas liquids (NGL) such as ethane, propane, butanes and pentanes.

Salt refinery: Cleans salt (NaCl), produced by the solar evaporation of sea water, followed by washing and re-crystallization.

Various metal refineries such as alumina, copper, gold, lead, nickel, silver, uranium, and zinc.


Vegetable oil refinery



A typical oil refinery

Oil refinery The image below is a schematic flow diagram of a typical oil refinery that depicts the various unit processes and the flow of intermediate product streams that occurs between the inlet crude oil feedstock and the final end products. The diagram depicts only one of the literally hundreds of different oil refinery configurations. It does not include any of the usual refinery facilities providing utilities such as steam, cooling water, and electric power as well as storage tanks for crude oil feedstock and for intermediate products and end products.

Electrical Generator

In electricity generation, an electrical generator is a device that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy, generally using electromagnetic induction. The reverse conversion of electrical energy into mechanical energy is done by a motor; motors and generators have many similarities. A generator forces electric charges to move through an external electrical circuit, but it does not create electricity or charge, which is already present in the wire of its windings. It is somewhat analogous to a water pump, which creates a flow of water but does not create the water inside. The source of mechanical energy may be a reciprocating or turbine steam engine, water falling through a turbine or waterwheel, an internal combustion engine, a wind turbine, a hand crank, compressed air or any other source of mechanical energy.

Historic developments.

Before the connection between magnetism and electricity was discovered, electrostatic generators were invented that used electrostatic principles. These generated very high voltages and low currents. They operated by using moving electrically charged belts, plates and disks to carry charge to a high potential electrode. The charge was generated using either of two mechanisms:

• Electrostatic induction
• The triboelectric effect

where the contact between two insulators leaves them charged.Because of their inefficiency and the difficulty of insulating machines producing very high voltages, electrostatic generators had low power ratings and were never used for generation of commercially-significant quantities of electric power. The Wimshurst machine and Van de Graaff generator are examples of these machines that have survived.