Motivated by its success in middle distillate dynamic optimization with Aspen GDOT, Marathon Petroleum Company continues to enhance production with small-scale applications in naphtha and light-end distillation towers. These applications have accelerated value delivery with minimal resource expenditure.

Key features of the technology that enable the feasibility and validation of small-scope applications include:

• Component-based template models
• Nonlinear optimization of energy and product recovery 
• True economic optimization
• Data reconciliation to estimate unmeasured or infrequently measured qualities (e.g., tower input stream compositions)

Aspen GDOT identifies the ideal operating points for key composition variables or stream properties and sends targets to the existing Aspen DMC3™ controllers, dynamically executing economic optimum targets and minimizing manual effort.