Technology & Engineering Center

Technology & Engineering Center is a group of experts in production technology related to process development, design, construction, operation, fuel quality design, and asset management of refineries and petrochemical complexes.
A wide range of high-level technologies are cultivated in refining and petrochemical industries, and the ability to quickly accomplish tasks through the coordination of our engineers enable us to provide high level technical support for the safety and stable operation and competitiveness of domestic and overseas refineries and petrochemical complexes, as well as to promote concrete measures to deal with climate change and development of manufacturing processes for new materials and new functional chemicals, leading to our contribution toward the realization of a better society.

We develop and provide a wide variety of new functional materials. Among them, the product manufacturing process is a key factor in determining quality, cost, product yield, and supply stability. The Technology & Engineering Center has created a variety of experimental equipment to collect and analyze data for designing and optimizing manufacturing processes. Scaling up from flask-sized experiments to equipment with an annual production capacity of tens of thousands of tons requires detailed experiments and analysis.

The development and design of reactors are extremely important in the development of processes for producing new functional materials, as they affect quality, cost, and product yield. In order to design higher performance reactors, the Center collects experimental chemical reaction data, evaluates the flow patterns using cold models, and finally uses computational fluid dynamics simulations to optimize the reactor design. In particular, since experiments cannot be conducted at the scale of the actual equipment, it is necessary to accurately predict the performance of the reactor through virtual simulations and grasp the optimal conditions for actual operation. The figure shows the analysis results of a stirring tank reactor and a fluidized catalytic cracking reactor.

We conduct research into the rational use of oil products, quality design with a view to future changes, technology accumulation research into oil product safety, and quality design with safety in mind. As gasoline and diesel fuel are used for passenger cars, trucks, and buses, we have facilities such as chassis dynamometers and engine benches that enable us to evaluate the performance of these fuels by using actual cars and engines. At chassis dynamometers, we use actual vehicles to evaluate emissions and driving performance under various temperatures and operating conditions, and design fuels suitable for different regions and seasons in Japan. At engine benches, we evaluate various aspects of the engine itself, mainly in terms of emissions and combustion conditions, leading to the design of high-quality fuels for automobiles.