Detailed Chemical Composition of Straight-Run Vacuum Gas Oil and Its Distillates as a Function of the Atmospheric Equivalent Boiling Point

The boiling point distribution of petroleum samples remarkably affects the refining process and economic evaluation. The chemical composition of petroleum samples also varies with the boiling range, which is even more important for the processing procedure. In this work, a quick and convenient method was developed to build a dear relationship between boiling points and structures of organic compounds. A straight-run vacuum gas oil (VGO) and its narrow distillates were characterized by Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS). The boiling point distribution of the main species in the petroleum samples was obtained by combining the FT-ICR MS data and the predicted boiling points of the compounds. Traditional gas chromatographic simulated distillations were also carried out to calibrate the boiling point distributions based on FT-ICR MS data. The detailed chemical composition of VGO varied as a function of the atmospheric equivalent boiling point (AEBP). Moreover, some composition information on the narrow cuts was calculated by the chemical composition of VGO. The calculated values matched well with the measured values of the narrow cuts by FT-ICR MS.