This work presents a predictive and
generally applicable approach
to asphaltene pyrolysis modeling. Asphaltenes derived from heavy fuel
oil 380 (HFO) were characterized using elemental analysis and FT-ICR
MS. The structural information derived from the chemical analysis
guided the formulation of five surrogate molecules. The atomic ratios
of the surrogate molecules were defined to replicate the elemental
composition of each data as their linear combination. This approach
makes the model flexible and readily applicable to any asphaltene
fraction by only knowing its elemental composition. The formulation
of the kinetic model proceeded through chemistry-related considerations
on the reactions most likely to take place at a given temperature
for each component. The authors also used the experimental data obtained
from thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) in an inert atmosphere, either
reported in the literature or generated by the authors for the development
of the kinetic scheme. The kinetic scheme consists of five first-order
reactions. The activation energy (E
a)
and Arrhenius (A) coefficient were tuned using a
subset of the experimental data available and validated with the remaining
data. The product distribution of the in-house-produced samples was
obtained from a TGA–MS and TGA–FTIR analysis and used
to adjust the stoichiometric coefficients together with experimental
data reported in the literature. The model presented a satisfactory
agreement with the most recent experimental data while showing some
discrepancies with older data, which are discussed in the paper. The
model reported in this work represents the first step of a more comprehensive
project aimed to reconstruct the chemical kinetics of HFOs as a combination
of their saturate, aromatic, resin, and asphaltene fractions.
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