The fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) unit is the primary production unit for gasoline and olefins in refineries. Improving product yield and processing capacity is closely related to the economic benefits of refineries. In this paper, we use the Aspen HYSYS software to model the mechanism of an 800 kt/a FCC unit in China. The simulation of the FCC unit based on the 21-lump models and the simulation results are in good agreement with the actual factory production data. Then we find out the optimization method to improve the product yield and processing capacity through the model research. The results of the study indicate the following optimization plans: when keeping the riser outlet temperature (ROT) in the range of 535~545 °C, it can increase the yield of gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) by up to 5%; when keeping the riser outlet temperature (ROT) in the range of 510~520 °C, it can increase the yield of gasoline and diesel by up to 0.5%; the optimal ROT of control temperature should be 530 °C when ensuring the same gasoline yield and increasing processing capacity, it can increase the feed rate by 14.3% which in turn increases gasoline production. Through the above plans, the refinery can achieve the production goals of yield and capacity. Therefore, the refinery can get more profits.

The vacuum distillation unit (VDU) is the key unit to produce vacuum gas oil and vacuum residue, which has a very important impact on the downstream secondary processing units. The optimization of deep-cut vacuum distillation seeks to improve the yield of heavy vacuum gas oil (HVGO) and its dry point temperature, which is related to the economic benefits of the refinery. In this study, we first established a simple model of a VDU by using the Aspen HYSYS Process simulation software. Then, we built a rigorous model with fast convergence by using the initial values obtained by the simple model. The rigorous model can accurately reflect the refinery’s operation and can make predictions. Then, based on the rigorous model, we increased the flash section temperature (FST) to 420 °C and the steam flow rate (SFR) of the stripping to 26 t/h. We eventually increased the yield of HVGO by 6.3 percentage points to 43.4%, while increasing its D86 95%-point temperature by 31.9 °C to 570.9 °C. In this way, the refinery can effectively optimize the deep-cut vacuum distillation and obtain greater economic benefits.

Aiming at the problems of low precision, low search efficiency, and being easy to fall into local optimization of the multi-objective harris hawk optimization algorithm (MOHHO) based on grid method, a MOHHO based on blank angle region enhanced search (BARESMOHHO) is proposed. The main changes of the algorithm are as follows: firstly, chaotic mapping is used to initialize the population, which is beneficial to speed up the search. Then, in order to find low-density regions faster, the algorithm adjusts the classification level according to the number of individuals in the external archive. In order to make the distribution of individuals in the target space more uniform, inspired by the idea of symmetrical segmentation, the number of archives at different levels are symmetrically distributed. Finally, it strengthens the search for the non-individual region (blank angle region) in the process of division. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparing it with some known classical functions on test functions.