Solid Phase Equation of State Application for Wax Formation Prediction in Petroleum Mixtures.

Precipitation of solid paraffins is one of the most common problems in the oil industry, imposing high operating costs. There have been a great many efforts for the prediction of solid paraffins precipitation up to now. Most of them were based on activity coefficient models accounting to solid phase non-ideality or the multi-solid model to calculate the number of precipitated solid phases. In this work, solid phase behavior is predicted by a solid equation of state. At first, by using the thermodynamic method (subcoled liquid) for pure solid phase fugacity from pure liquid fugacity, the solid EOS parameters are tuned. The tuned solid EOS can then be directly applied for the prediction of the amount of precipitated solid paraffins (waxes) in the oil samples. The proposed equations system in this work is solved by a proper mathematical method. The obtained results of wax precipitation in this work are in good agreement with the experimental data.