Structural insights into crude oil asphaltenes II: Correlating molecular descriptors to multi-scale structure

DOI

Asphaltenes are a complex and problematic fraction of crude oil that can precipitate, block pipeline and foul refineryequipment. Asphaltenes have a high proportion of aromatic carbon and heteroatoms (N, S, O) and are generally thought to consist of one (or more) aromatic cores with alkyl side chains. For solid asphaltenes the structural model used is of small clusters of stacked asphaltene molecules approximately 1-2nm in size. We have found that we can alter the level of stacking and phase separation using different precipitants. The proposed experiment will measure wide Q-range neutron total scattering of solid and dispersed asphaltenes from different source crudes and further fractionated according to their propensity to precipitate. Allowing us to see if the trends observed to date a true for asphaltenes from all sources.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.101133293
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/101133293
Provenance
Creator Dr Tom Headen; Dr Michael Hoepfner; Professor Erich Muller; Dr Guadalupe Jimenez Serratos; Mr K M Rizwanur Rahman
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2022
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Chemistry; Natural Sciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2019-02-18T09:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2019-02-22T09:00:00Z