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Saudi Aramco Yanbu' Refinery (YR) and Process and Control System Department engineers worked jointly to troubleshoot and resolve the successive plugging of the continuous catalyst regeneration (CCR) tower. The CCR section of the YR platformer experienced successive catalyst blowouts leading to a regeneration section shutdown. This caused the platformer section to operate at reduced feed rate and severity. It was concluded that the root cause for this problem was regeneration gas blower oversizing. The available option to reduce pinning was to lower the regeneration gas flow. Installing a restricrion orifice on the regeneration gas blower suction eliminated the pinning problem and normal CCR platformer operation resumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the elimination of corrosion and fouling in the second preheat exchangers at Yanbu Refinery Department (YRD) in Saudi Arabia. The refinery operates a hydroskimming refinery which processes crude oil through three preheat stages before entering the crude heaters. Also discussed are caustic injection, fouling and corrosion problems and inspection of middle preheat exchangers.