Impact of Non-Ideality Revealed in Numerical Simulations of Mixing of Hydrocarbons and Supercritical Water

SÁNCHEZ, FRANCISCO A.; P. HE; A.F. GHONIEM; SELVA PEREDA

San Francisco

Conferencia; AIChE Annual Meeting; 2016

AICHE

Upgrading heavy crude oil using near-critical or supercritical water (NCW/SCW) shows advantages such as high yielding of light oils, removal of sulfur content and heavy metals, etc. We study the thermodynamic and mixing process of crude oil and NCW/SCW, using representative hydrocarbons, like benzene and 1-decylnaphthalene. GCA-EoS, the first equation of state that takes into account association using a SAFT-like group contribution term, is used to predict the thermodynamic properties and phase equilibrium compositions. The generalized Maxwell-Stefan equations are solved to model the multicomponent mass transfer with the driving force expressed in terms of fugacity gradients to account for effects of non-ideality on mass fluxes. As the association behavior modeled in the GCA-EoS, we show in this study that the mixing simulations may predict more accurate results compared to our previous study using the PR-EoS. We demonstrate here that the GCA model can play an important role in the design of supercritical fluids reactors.