الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Crude oil blending is an important operation that provides flexibility for refineries with increasing operational complexity and constant change in feedstocks. Providing the same quality and quantity of the designed feed of a crude distillation unit became a great challenge due to the depletion of crude oil wells over time, so the crude oil blending is a very important operation nowadays that can provide a good alternative through available crude oils. Furthermore, the heavy crude oils are blended with lighter ones to meet the transportation specifications with lower required horse power. The challenge of such operation is the shrinkage loss in volume of the blended crude oil, so the shrinkage value has to be calculated to assure it is in a reasonable range.The heavy conventional crude oils have a low price, so some companies direct such crude oils to be blended with lighter ones with higher price to upgrade the overall price and improving the heavy crude oils marketing. The focus of the present work is to optimize the crude oil blend feeding an atmospheric distillation unit in a refining plant by maximizing the marginal profit while fulfilling the plant commitments. The plant feed has to meet the limitations on its characteristics and the plant production has to meet the required demand of domestic consumption of on spec fuels. The crude oils availability, prices, yields and the sales of the products are considered with the current configuration of the plant.