CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Petroleum fluids are normally saturated with water at reservoir conditions. During production, transportation, and processing, the dissolved water in the hydrocarbon phase may condense. The condensed water may contribute to gas hydrates and/or ice formation under specific temperature and pressure conditions. This phenomenon can arise during transportation in pipelines with large temperature gradients. Forming a condensed water phase may lead to corrosion and/or two-phase flow problems. The formation of gas hydrates and/or ice could result in pipelines blockage and shutdown. To avoid these problems, accurate knowledge of water + hydrocarbon phase behavior is of interest to the petroleum industry. The hydrocarbon solubility in water is also an important issue from an environmental aspect, due to new legislations and restrictions on the hydrocarbon content in water disposal. Unfortunately, experimental data on the solubility of heavy hydrocarbons in water, especially at low temperatures are scarce and often rather scattered. In this communication, we first report new experimental data on the solubility of normal hexane, cyclo-hexane and iso-octane in pure water, which have been measured using a static-analytic technique that takes advantage of a RolsiTM sampling device[1]. The new data have been measured in the (298.10 to 353.16) K temperature range and pressures up to 0.5 MPa. The experimental data measured in this work at 298 K have been compared with some selected data from the literature and the agreements are generally found acceptable. A group contribution plus association equation of state, namely the GCA-EoS[2], is then used to model the phase behavior of water + hydrocarbon (n-C2 to n-C6, Cyclo-C6, isobutane and iso-octane) systems. The predictions of the model are found in good agreement with the experimental data measured in this work and some selected experimental data from the literature.

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