Methods for substantiating the technology for restoring the quality of hydrocarbon fuels by their fractional composition

One of the physical processes taking place in hydrocarbon fuels during storage, transportation, pumping and refueling machines is mixing different groups and grades of hydrocarbon fuel in reservoirs, road vehicles' tanks and during pumping through pipelines. This causes a change in all the quality parameters of hydrocarbon fuel and, correspondingly, the ecological characteristics of combustion products are also deteriorated. As the basic technology for the theoretical research, we selected an entirely new method of restoring the quality of mixtures by their fractional composition through forced gas boiling (FGB) in vacuum. This technology consists in using barbotage of the mixture of oil products with gas (air, nitrogen), with continuous pumping out of the free volume of the vacuum system and sustaining the vacuum in the technological reservoir to be close to the pressure of saturated vapors of more volatile components of liquid mixtures. During this process, there is carryover of the volatile fraction with bubbles of gas and restoring of the fuels quality by their fractional composition. In order to perform a preliminary evaluation of the potential of this technology for mixtures separation, to obtain a calculation formula for estimating the mass of the volatile liquid separated from the mixture and giving recommendations about technological parameters for the process of restoring the quality of fuels by their fractional composition by the method of FGB in vacuum, we presented a theoretical substantiation of the proposed technology on the basis of forming heat balance and mass exchange equations, taking assumptions and analysis of the obtained results. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.