A New Investigation on Asphaltene Precipitation: Experimental and a New Thermodynamic Approach

The process of asphaltene precipitation has a substantial effect on oil production in petroleum industry. In this work, a series of experiments was carried to determine the asphaltene precipitation of crude oil during solvent titration condition with Iranian crude oil sample using experimental set up. The precipitants such as pentane, heptanes, hexane, nonane and decane with varying volumes were used. Also, a developed thermodynamic model based on micellization and PC-SAFT (perturbed chain modification Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) has been proposed to account asphaltene precipitation during solvent titration conditions and the proposed model was verified using experimental data obtained in this work and also with those reported in the literature. In the proposed micellization model the PC-SAFT EOS (cubic equations of state) is applied to predict the onset point and to perform flash calculations. In order to compare the performance of the proposed micellization model, the asphaltene precipitation experimental data were correlated using existing micellization model and the proposed micellization model. The results show that the proposed micellization model predicts more accurately the asphaltene precipitation experimental data and is in agreement with the experimental data of reported in this work and with those reported in the literature with a mean square error of 0.9%. Therefore the predictions obtained from this proposed model, resulted in a good agreement with experimental data which shows a significant improvement in comparison to the previous micellization model in the available literature.