H. Mashhadi Meighani, C. Ghotbi, T.

Jafari Behbahani,
A modified thermodynamic modeling of wax precipitation in crude oil based on PC-
SAFT model,
Fluid Phase Equilibria,
Volume 429,
2016,
Pages 313-324,
ISSN 0378-3812,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fluid.2016.09.010.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378381216304459)
Abstract: Wax precipitation may occur in production or transportation of crude oil
form field which is a serious problem in petroleum industry. Flow assurance issues
concerning wax precipitation make it necessary to develop a precise thermodynamic
model to predict the wax appearance temperature and amount of precipitation at
different conditions. In this work a new procedure has been proposed to
characterize crude oil based on the SARA test considering the wax and asphaltene as
single pseudo components. Two scenarios have been investigated for the survey of
the crude oil characterization, with and without asphaltene pseudo component. Also,
in this work, the Perturbed Chain form of the Statistical Associating Fluid Theory,
PC-SAFT, has been developed to evaluate its ability for modeling of wax
precipitation prediction. It is demonstrated that the developed PC-SAFT model can
correlate the wax precipitation amount better than basic models (multiple solid,
solid solution) typically used in the industry. The results obtained with the
proposed model show a remarkable matching with the experimental data for wax
precipitation values. The obtained results are very promising in providing better
approach to model wax precipitation. The effect of asphaltene molecules on wax
precipitation has been investigated by sensitivity analysis using Monte Carlo
algorithm and the Artificial Neural Network as the base model. In this work, a
three layer FFBP neural network has been constructed using the Levenberg–Marquardt
training method to predict the wax precipitation amount at different conditions
which are the network input parameters. Positive effect of asphaltene on wax
precipitation confirmed that asphaltene molecules act like the nucleation sites for
wax crystals. The obtained results in this work show that the asphaltene content of
crude oil should be considered in wax precipitation models.
Keywords: Wax precipitation; Characterization; PC-SAFT; Sensitivity analysis