Revisiting the flocculation kinetics of destabilized asphaltenes.

A comprehensive review of the recently published work on asphaltene destabilization and flocculation kinetics is presented. Four different experimental techniques were used to study asphaltenes undergoing flocculation process in crude oils and model oils. The asphaltenes were destabilized by different n-alkanes and a geometric population balance with the Smoluchowski collision kernel was used to model the asphaltene aggregation process. Additionally, by postulating a relation between the aggregation collision efficiency and the solubility parameter of asphaltenes and the solution, a unified model of asphaltene aggregation model was developed. When the aggregation model is applied to the experimental data obtained from several different crude oil and model oils, the detection time curves collapsed onto a universal single line, indicating that the model successfully captures the underlying physics of the observed process.

Dimer covering and percolation frustration.

Covering a graph or a lattice with nonoverlapping dimers is a problem that has received considerable interest in areas, such as discrete mathematics, statistical physics, chemistry, and materials science. Yet, the problem of percolation on dimer-covered lattices has received little attention. In particular, percolation on lattices that are fully covered by nonoverlapping dimers has not evidently been considered. Here, we propose a procedure for generating random dimer coverings of a given lattice. We then compute the bond percolation threshold on random and ordered coverings of the square and the triangular lattices on the remaining bonds connecting the dimers. We obtain p_{c}=0.367713(2) and p_{c}=0.235340(1) for random coverings of the square and the triangular lattices, respectively. We observe that the percolation frustration induced as a result of dimer covering is larger in the low-coordination-number square lattice. There is also no relationship between the existence of long-range order in a covering of the square lattice and its percolation threshold. In particular, an ordered covering of the square lattice, denoted by shifted covering in this paper, has an unusually low percolation threshold and is topologically identical to the triangular lattice. This is in contrast to the other ordered dimer coverings considered in this paper, which have higher percolation thresholds than the random covering. In the case of the triangular lattice, the percolation thresholds of the ordered and random coverings are very close, suggesting the lack of sensitivity of the percolation threshold to microscopic details of the covering in highly coordinated networks.

The fractal aggregation of asphaltenes.

This paper discusses time-resolved small-angle neutron scattering results that were used to investigate asphaltene structure and stability with and without a precipitant added in both crude oil and model oil. A novel approach was used to isolate the scattering from asphaltenes that are insoluble and in the process of aggregating from those that are soluble. It was found that both soluble and insoluble asphaltenes form fractal clusters in crude oil and the fractal dimension of the insoluble asphaltene clusters is higher than that of the soluble clusters. Adding heptane also increases the size of soluble asphaltene clusters without modifying the fractal dimension. Understanding the process of insoluble asphaltenes forming fractals with higher fractal dimensions will potentially reveal the microscopic asphaltene destabilization mechanism (i.e., how a precipitant modifies asphaltene-asphaltene interactions). It was concluded that because of the polydisperse nature of asphaltenes, no well-defined asphaltene phase stability envelope exists and small amounts of asphaltenes precipitated even at dilute precipitant concentrations. Asphaltenes that are stable in a crude oil-precipitant mixture are dispersed on the nanometer length scale. An asphaltene precipitation mechanism is proposed that is consistent with the experimental findings. Additionally, it was found that the heptane-insoluble asphaltene fraction is the dominant source of small-angle scattering in crude oil and the previously unobtainable asphaltene solubility at low heptane concentrations was measured.