Estudo termodinâmico da precipitação de parafinas em petróleos brasileiros

• Autor(a) principal: Filipakis, Sofia D'ornella
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/11966
• topic: Paraffin; Wax; Thermodynamic Modeling; Oil; Solid-Liquid Equilibrium; Parafinas; Modelagem Termodinâmica; Petróleo; Equilíbrio Sólido-Líquido; CNPQ::ENGENHARIAS::ENGENHARIA QUIMICA::PROCESSOS INDUSTRIAIS DE ENGENHARIA QUIMICA

A major challenge faced by the oil industry is to reduce the impact of undesirable crystallization of high molecular weight paraffins in pipelines and production equipments. The paraffin crystallization is usually detected by measuring the wax appearance temperature (WAT), which can be estimated from composition based thermodynamic modeling. The goals of this work are: to study the main thermodynamic models adopted for paraffin crystallization description, to check models performances for Brazilian crudes and to determine the best model for these oils. For this, composition data from twenty-three Brazilian oils were used. For the thermodynamic modeling of wax precipitation in these crude oils, three forms of calculating the ratio between the solid and the liquid phase fugacities and five models to calculate the activity coefficients of components in each phase were used. The results showed that the ideal model for multiple solid phases and the Escobar-Remolina model give results far below the experimental WAT. For the single solid ideal, Won and Coutinho models, the points to be mentioned are described as follows: a) most of the errors is negative; b) the errors distribution is better when the correlation used for i calculation is the number 2; c) the average errors for ideal, Won and Coutinho models are equivalent, except when all the oil components are considered to precipitate; d) the results obtained from Coutinho model presents systematic error in relation to the ideal model; e) the different ways to calculate the ratio between the solid and the liquid phase fugacities strongly influence the predictive ability of models, which was not expected; f) the composition profile of the first crystal formed in the oil is influenced by the heavier molecules in the residue, which shows the need of developing robust and accurate methods of heavy fractions characterization; g) the inclusion of an estimate for the residue composition effectively improved the performance of models for intermediate crude; h) for heavy oil, there was an increase in prediction error due to the little amount of paraffinic compounds in these residues. The need for better characterization of the residues is corroborated by the fact that the calculated WAT is normally lower than the experimental WAT and by the improvement on the models performance when the estimation of the residue composition was done for intermediate crudes