Development of a New Model for Quantifying of Asphaltene Deposition - Role of Precipitation, Aggregation and Radial Transport

Asphaltenes are the heaviest and most polar components of crude oils which are commonly stable in the oil, and can precipitate, aggregate and eventually deposit in reservoirs, flow lines, separators, and other systems along production lines due to changes in conditions such as temperature, pressure and composition.

There are a few studies published in the literature focusing on the prediction of asphaltene deposition in pipelines, which reveals that there is lack of a comprehensive deposition simulator which fully considers all effective process during asphaltene deposition phenomena. In this work, a novel framework with considering all effective process in asphaltene deposition was developed and validated to predict the deposition profile of asphaltene during the multiphase flow along the steel tube. Results of this work shows that the asphaltene particles tend to aggregate with each other due to Brownian motion, so the asphaltene deposition model must consider this change in particle size of asphaltenes during the oil flow. It can also be concluded that in addition to the horizontal and vertical flow of oil in the tube, the radial movements of asphaltenes should also be considered to model the asphaltene deposition on the tube surface.