Fire in the hole …

“I am building a fire, and everyday I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.” -- Mia Hamm (American Soccer Player. b.1972)

A recent Google® search produced an interesting article on visbreaking.

Visbreaking is an important technology in the process of bringing crude oil to market. If you are an expert, you already understand this technology. But other readers of this blog will find very good background on the technology at …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visbreaking

What I like about this article is the application of one technology … NMR … to improve the results of another technology … visbreaking. Here are excerpts from the article …

Fuel 89 (2010) 185–192
Correlations between SARA fractions and physicochemical properties with 1H NMR spectra of vacuum residues from Colombian crude oils
Daniel Molina V, Uriel Navarro Uribe, Juan Murgich
Corresponding authors: dmolina@uis.edu.co  (D. Molina V), jmurgich@ivic.ve , jmurgi-ch@yahoo.com  (J.Murgich).
doi:10.1016/j.fuel.2009.07.021


Introduction
Vacuum residues are one of the main byproducts of oil refining that require extensive thermal cracking and, in some cases, visbreaking before their conversion to more valuable products. Usually, in order to predict the amount and quality of the resulting products, it is necessary to determine the physicochemical properties of each residue continuously. The assessment of these properties is, generally, carried out by methods mostly developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Once the physicochemical properties and SARA composition of the residues are measured, the operational scheme of the refinery that generates the best yields is, then, determined. The ASTM methods are quite slow, elaborate, and expensive, requiring large amounts of the residue to be analyzed and use large quantities of expensive solvents. The handling of the vacuum residues is, generally, difficult due to their high viscosity at room temperature and their stickiness to all kinds of containers. This makes the analysis of the residues a rather cumbersome and costly procedure. Some of these analyses are required to be performed up to weeks, depending on the physicochemical properties and saturates, aromatics, resins and asphaltenes SARA components. Faster and less expensive methods to analyze these residues using spectroscopic methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are thus of great interest to optimize valuable refinery outputs at significantly lower prices and in much shorter times.
…
In this work, the vacuum residues of a wide variety of Colombian crudes ranging from light paraffinic to heavy aromatic were studied. A vacuum residue of a typical blend of naphtenic crudes used as a refinery feed was also included to have a more complete set. It is expected that residues of most other Colombian and other crudes will fall within this set. Using their 1H NMR spectrum, a method was developed that was able to predict some physicochemical properties and the SARA composition of the residue of a particular crude or a mixture of them. These methods may allow the selection of the most efficient conditions for the cracking and visbreaking processes of these residues in a very short time. In this way, costly studies and refinery trial runs may be avoided with the corresponding savings in cost and time.

Use this DOI – Digital Object Identifier - 10.1016/j.fuel.2009.07.021 to see more details on the article and / or to obtain a full text copy.

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