Bitumen at Oil Sand Facility

In a Canadian oil sand surface mine, recovered oil is refined directly on site. One of the many processing steps involved is the thermal treatment of bitumen, called cooking. In this operation, the bitumen flow needs to be measured at temperatures between 350°C and 400°C. Thus, the coker feed requires accurate monitoring and regulation of product input which can only be accomplished by reliable flow measurement. 

Moreover, some flow meters are also used for the detection of line clogging. Clogged lines can easily cause a shutdown of the entire facility, leading to enormous downtime costs. In the past, such measurements were done with differential pressure methods or vortex shedding meters. Like all inline measuring instruments, these were subject to wear and tear and demanded daily maintenance.

Non-intrusive flow measurement proved to be a significantly better solution. A test measurement, using the WaveInjector together with a portable transmitter on a 6" pipe carrying hot VAC tower residue demonstrated the superiority of ultrasonic technology.

Fortunately for the customer, this test measurement revealed a control valve failure. The refinery now uses the flow values delivered by the WaveInjector and a permanent FLUXUS ADM 7407 transmitter for a reliable mass balancing in the upgrader process.

Your Benefits:

• Easy installation under problematic conditions

• Straight forward installation with no need to open the pipe and no downtime

• No corrosion or wear caused by the medium - thus a long operating life