Extended Distillation and Property Correlations for Heavy Oil

Abstract

A previously developed Deep Vacuum Fractionation Apparatus (DVFA) was modified and improved to provide reproducible and consistent distillation data and samples of cuts with reproducible physical properties. The apparatus can distill up to 50 wt% of a bitumen compared to the 25% typically obtained with a conventional vacuum distillation. An interconversion method was implemented to obtain the Normal Boiling Points (NBP) of the distillation fractions. The physical properties of the distillation cuts collected were measured and used to improve and develop correlations to predict the normal boiling point (NBP), specific gravity (SG), molecular weight (MW), heat capacity, heat of vaporization, and heat of combustion of heavy distillation cuts. In addition, two methods were developed to generate property distributions from only bulk properties and distillation data. The extensive property measurements for the heavy distillation cuts provide a unique property database. The correlations developed in this thesis form the basis of an improved characterization procedure that requires only conventional distillation data and bulk specific gravity.