Heavy oil and bitumen's low American Petroleum Institute (API) gravity and high viscosity make the economics of their industrialization difficult. Therefore, new recovery techniques must be developed to enhance these materials. Ultradispersed catalytic hydroprocessing of heavy oil and bitumen has been proposed as one of these novel techniques and has been tested in laboratories and pilot plants. In this work, a kinetic model for ultradispersed catalytic hydroprocessing of bitumen is proposed. Kinetic parameters were estimated from experimental results obtained in a tubular pilot plant reactor. The predicted products composition was in good agreement with experimental values with average absolute errors of less than 7%. Additionally, experimental liquid products viscosity and residue conversions followed an exponential correlation. This correlation, in combination with the results from the kinetic modeling, was employed to create a computational program that calculates products distribution from bitumen hydroprocessing and provides reaction conditions to achieve a specific liquid products viscosity.

Typically, the catalytic upgrading of heavy fractions (VGO and VR) has been studied using mostly conventional supported catalysts at temperatures and pressures higher than 400 °C and 6 MPa, respectively. This work focuses on the upgrading of heavy oils at much lower severity conditions using dispersed NiWMo catalysts for processing whole oil with no fractionation. A kinetic study was developed to determine parameters from experimental data obtained at temperatures of 320À380 °C and reaction times from 3 to 70 h at a total hydrogen pressure of 3.45 MPa and a stirring speed of 500 rpm in a batch reactor. The conversion, estimated as the reduction of the residue 545 °C+ fraction, was fitted for a first-order reaction with an apparent activation energy of 200 kJ mol À1 . Two kinetic models are proposed to predict the conversion of the residue fraction and its product distribution. Comparison between experimental data and predictions using the proposed models exhibited good agreement with average absolute errors lower than 5%.

Scientific projects frequently involve measurements of thermophysical, thermochemical, and other related properties of chemical compounds and materials. These measured property data have significant potential value for the scientific community, but incomplete and inaccurate reporting often hampers their utilization. The present IUPAC Technical Report summarizes the needs of chemical engineers and researchers as consumers of these data and shows how publishing practices can improve information transfer. In the Report, general principles of Good Reporting Practice are developed together with examples illustrating typical cases of reporting issues. Adoption of these principles will improve the quality, reproducibility, and usefulness of experimental data, bring a better level of consistency to results, and increase the efficiency and impact of research. Closely related to Good Reporting Practice, basic elements of Good Research Practice are also introduced with a goal to reduce the number of ambiguities and unresolved problems within the thermophysical property data domain.

An innovative way to upgrade heavy crude oils is the use of ultradispersed catalysts; however, an adequate mathematical expression that describes the mass transfer on this process is still missing. This paper studies the separation and suspension of ultradispersed particles based on their motion through diverse viscous media enclosed in horizontal cylindrical channels. A time-dependent, three-dimensional convective-dispersive model which simulates the transient deposition and suspension of these particles immersed in viscous media inside a horizontal cylinder was developed and solved. This model was also experimentally validated, and its results unveiled the particle and fluid media properties that are necessary to control particle deposition. The experiments were performed using Fe 2 O 3 particles (average sizes of 198 nm) immersed in water-glycerol mixtures with different densities and viscosities subject to different fluid velocities. The effect of the fluid medium properties, the initial particle concentration, and fluid velocity on the dispersion coefficient was also studied.