Sharif Digital Repository

In this research, the behavior of surfactin at the presence of water, decane, and asphaltene is investigated. Decane is chosen instead of crude oil to simplify the model. In the first chapter, basic molecular structures are introduced. Furthermore, in the second chapter molecular dynamics simulation, as the main tool in these simulations, is introduced. In the third chapter, one of the most important quantities in chemical engineering, diffusion coefficient, is chosen to investigate the efficiency and accuracy of molecular dynamics simulation method to calculate such a quantity and results show that molecular dynamics simulation can present accurate quantities, more accurate than common... 

Asphaltene precipitation and deposition may cause severe problems during different stages of oil recovery. All proposed remediation techniques have proven costly and not highly effective, so prevention becomes the most beneficial way to counteract the problem. Revelation of the deposition mechanism and determination of the parameters are necessary in order to devise reliable prevention strategies.This work presents results of the effect of lean gas and CO2 injection process as well as natural depletion on dynamic asphaltene precipitation and deposition. In addition sets of experiments were performed in the same porous media using STO and solvent (with different volume ratios) to investigate... 

Asphaltene are the heaviest components if some crude oil which are in thermodynamic equilibrium. Any change in the equilibrium condition including change in temperature, pressure or composition may render asphaltene to come out of solution and precipitate. Asphaltene precipitation and deposition is one of the main problems in some of the oil fields. Precipitated asphaltene may deposit in the reservoir, near wellbore, wellstring, transport pipeline and surface facilities. In porous media, the deposited asphaltene over the surface and/or across pore throat can severely reduce the effective permeability and results in decreasing of the oil production. Also, the deposited asphaltene results in... 

Asphaltine particle precipitation may lead to serious problems in petroleum industry; including wellbore transmissibility reduction. One of the proposed remedial methods is to make a use of the microorganisms which are able to consume the heavy hydrocarbon chains.
Hydrophobicity of a cell surface is one of the parameters which greatly affect the microorganism adhesion to water insoluble hydrocarbons, in which results a higher hydrocarbon biodegradation. Consequently as the hydrophobicity of a cell surface increases; the microorganism tendency to bond with the hydrocarbon molecule enhances. The presence of a surface active agent, as an instance a chemical surfactant, will affect the... 

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) is a collection of techniques that utilize microorganisms and their metabolic products to improve the recovery of crude oil from reservoir rock. From the advantages of this method, independency to the oil price and environmental benign can be mentioned. Many mechanisms have been proposed to contribute on MEOR, but still there is no enough knowledge about the mechanisms that causes inabilities in manipulating the process to get more oil production.
In the present study, the effect of a native type of bacteria, Enterobacter cloacae, on the glass surfaces wettability which were aged in expose of model oil with different asphaltene concentration was... 

Interfacial Tension (IFT) as a main parameter for gas flooding efficiency in oil reservoirs depends highly on pressure, temperature, and composition of the reservoir fluids. Therefore, it is important to measure this parameter at real reservoir condition for successful field development plan. In this study, an axisymmetric drop shape analysis (ADSA) has been utilized to measure the equilibrium IFTs in crude oil-CO2 as well as crude oil-N2 systems at different temperatures and pressures. Moreover, minimum miscibility pressures (MMP) and first-contact miscibility pressures (Pmax) of crude oil/CO2 and crude oil/N2 systems at different temperature levels are determined by applying vanishing... 

Water in oil emulsion usually forms during natural water encroachment or enhanced oil recovery processes due to the reaction between asphaltenic and naphthenic acid part of oil with brine in some heavy oil reservoirs. This results in major production challenges because of high w/o emulsion viscosity which leads to significant pressure drops. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the dominant mechanisms of w/o emulsion flow in porous media to overcome the production challenges. In the present study, w/o emulsion behavior is investigated through both static and dynamic tests. The w/o emulsion was prepared through mixing of a crude with brine using magnet stirrer. Emulsion stability... 

Crude oil is made up of dozens of chemicals which based on their structural similarity, SARA test separate it into four categories: saturates, aromatics, resins and asphaltene. Asphaltenes are recognized as the largest, heaviest and the most polarizable fraction of the crude oil which are in thermodynamic equilibrium with oil at reservoir conditions. Each of the physical, chemical, electrical or mechanical disruption of this balance during production can result in instability and asphaltene precipitation may occur and eventually led to deposition in the reservoir, wells, pipelines, etc. Due to the fact that most changes in temperature and pressure will generated in the wells, thus... 

The aim of this project was to upgrade and reduce viscosity of heavy oils by adsorbing of asphaltene on Ni-Mo/CB and converting it into lighter and more valuable gas and liquid compounds. Asphaltene has been extracted from a heavy crude oil sample of Soroush oil field in Iran. After adsorption, Asphaltene conversion to lighter components (gas/liquid) was studied through hydrocracking process. To prepare the support of catalyst, Carbon Black, initially a thermal treatment step under the argon gas atmosphere followed by acid-washing process was performed. Afterward, the catalysts was prepared through dry impregnation method. In order to activate catalyst for hydrocracking, the catalysts has... 

Asphaltenes are a polydisperse mixture of the heaviest and most polarizable fractions of the crude oil. They are defined according to their solubility properties as being soluble in aromatic solvents but insoluble in light paraffin solvents. Asphaltenes are usually responsible for many problems like wettability changes of the reservoir rock, pore clogging in the reservoir porous matrix and fouling in wellbore tubing and production surface facilities. Most of the studies in the literature, addressing the asphaltene precipitation and deposition (APD), are investigating natural depletion or gas injection process such as CO2 flooding. These studies show that asphaltene deposition and... 

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 ... 

Efforts to identify, predict, and resolve problems linked to asphaltenes and flow assurance have resulted in the development of numerous laboratory and modelling techniques. However, there has been little research on the molecular structure of asphaltenes and how it relates to solubility, stability, aggregation, and deposition behavior. Not only was a thorough structural analysis of asphaltene extracted from three samples of light, medium, and heavy oil performed in this study, but medium oil asphaltene was also fractionated into three sub-fractions based on solubility, with minimum, medium, and maximum solubility, and each subfraction was subjected to a structural analysis. All asphaltene... 

During the production of crude oil from reservoirs, the production of quantities of formation water along with this oil, causes the crude oil does not have the necessary indicators for transportation, refining and ultimately export. The presence of water and salt along with crude oil causes corrosion of refinery and transmission equipment and makes oil unfavorable in terms of economic efficiency (both for domestic use and for export). water and salt produce stable emulsion with oil that can be stable for a long time and can not be easily separated from crude oil. Therefore, separation of water and salt from crude oil is one of the most important issues in the oil industry. Breaking this...