Thermodiffusion in multicomponent hydrocarbon mixtures: Experimental investigations and computational analysis

Abstract

In an unprecedented experimental investigation, a ternary and a four component hydrocarbon mixture at high pressure have been studied in a nearly convection free environment to understand the thermodiffusion process. A binary mixture has also been investigated in this environment. Experimental investigations of the three mixtures have been conducted in space onboard the spacecraft FOTON-M3 thereby isolating the gravity-induced convection that otherwise interferes with thermodiffusion experiments on Earth. The experimental results have also been used to test a thermodiffusion model that has been calibrated based on the results of previous experimental investigations. It was found that with an increase in the number of components in the mixtures, the performance of the thermodiffusion model deteriorated. Computational analysis was also made to estimate the possible sources of errors. Simulations showed that the vibrations of the spacecraft could influence the estimates of thermodiffusion factors. It was also found that they are sensitive to slight variations in the temperature of the mixture.

Impact of Thermodiffusion on the Initial Vertical Distribution of Species in Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

“…As a first example we have studied the behavior of a C 1 -nC 4 -nC 12 synthetic mixture in which the mole fractions are respectively 0.2, 0.4 and 0.4 (Van Vaerenbergh et al 2009). Reference conditions at the mid column depth are a temperature equal to 333.15K and a pressure equal to 35 MPa.…”

“…Although noticeable progresses have been made during the last twenty years, see Assael et al (2014) and references therein, especially on ternary mixtures both theoretically (Firoozabadi et al 2000;Kempers 2001;Galliero et al 2003) and experimentally (Leahy-Dios et al 2005;Bou-Ali et al 2015) more work is necessary. Micro-gravity experiments are one possible way to provide further data on thermodiffusion in multicomponent mixtures (Georis et al 1998;Van Vaerenbergh et al 2009;Touzet et al 2011;Khlybov et al 2015). They are particularly interesting because they provide, by default, experimental conditions free of convection effect.…”

“…This project aims at measuring thermodiffusion in multicomponent fluid mixtures of petroleum interest using a microgravity set-up. It follows a previous SCCO experiment that has flown on Russian Foton M3 missions (Van Vaerenbergh et al 2009;Touzet et al 2011). This previous experiment was dedicated to the measurement of thermodiffusion in binary, ternary and quaternary hydrocarbon "academic" mixtures.…”

“…This previous experiment was dedicated to the measurement of thermodiffusion in binary, ternary and quaternary hydrocarbon "academic" mixtures. It has yield interesting results in liquid mixtures showing, among others, the limitations of some models to quantify thermodiffusion in more than binary mixtures (Van Vaerenbergh et al 2009). However, for the mixtures composed of gases and liquids, difficulties were encountered during the gas chromatography analysis leading to unexpectedly high values of the measured thermodiffusion separation (Touzet et al 2011).…”

Thermodiffusion of the tetrahydronaphthalene and dodecane mixture under high pressure and in porous medium

“…The most recent reference one may cite are the high-pressure measurements of the thermal diffusion coefficients made with a thermogravitational column [10]. This lack of HP measurements has led to the development of the SCCO project (ESA + Total) [11,12]. The main objective of this project was to perform microgravity measurements of thermal diffusion of various mixtures under HP conditions.…”