Journal of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Technology

Journal of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Technology

Thermodynamic Modeling of Wax Formation Temperature in Paraffinic Systems Using Cubic Plus Chain Equation of State

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Engineering, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, P.O. Box 7516913817, Iran
Abstract
The purpose of this research was to develop a thermodynamic model for predicting wax formation temperature, using the cubic plus chain (CPC) equation of state and multi-solid and solid solution models. The investigated systems in this work were binary and ternary systems of normal alkanes. In the solid solution model, the solid phase is considered as an ideal solution. In this research, the modeling results of wax formation temperature for six hydrocarbon systems were obtained and compared with experimental data. The hydrocarbon systems consisted of three ternary systems including C14-C15-C16, C16-C17-C18, C18-C19-C20 and also three binary systems including C14-C16, C17-C19, and C16-C18 systems. According to the obtained results, the average absolute error in calculating the wax formation temperature for these systems was 1.03% for the solid solution model and 0.67% for the multi-solid model. According to the average absolute error for these systems, it was found that the multi-solid model provided better results than the solid solution model. By comparing the obtained results, using the CPC and SRK equations of state, it was determined that the results of these two equations of state for these normal alkanes were almost similar. Comparing the results obtained in this work with the works of Parsa et al., Ghanaei et al., Shahahmadi et al., and Mansoorpour et al., showed that the accuracy of this model was comparable and noteworthy to these models and provided better results than some of these models.
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