Enabling Technology Development for Hydrocarbon Resource Production, Transport and Refining

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Development of enabling technologies for hydrocarbon production, transport and refining is a broad topic. The focus of this proposal and our NSERC-RG funded research more broadly is the incubation of novel ideas and concepts that find application in process design and process simulation software used primarily by chemical and mechanical engineers. Our goals are to provide key inputs for or to provide computational tools themselves that permit calculations to be performed where it has not been possible to perform them previously, and to improve upon current calculation methods which are prone to failure. Some of the projects pursued are purely mathematical, others are purely experimental, others still are a combination of the two. Our targeted applications concern the production, transport and refining of heavy oils and bitumen - strategic energy resources for Canada and the world in general - but we have observed that the results obtained are broadly applicable. The projects funded under this rubric, if successful and appropriate, are also elaborated within the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Petroleum Thermodynamics research program that has a specific mandate within the hydrocarbon energy sector. Our most recent relevant success is the work of Vasek Lastovka (PhD 2012) and Nafiseh Dadgostar (PhD 2013) developed a generalized similarity concept that permitted for the first time the integrated prediction of isobaric heat capacities for solids, liquids and ideal gases for hydrocarbon based compounds and mixtures with compositions known on a molecular basis or comprising ill-defined constituents, with equal ease and precision. The resulting correlations have been transferred to industry, and have been included in recent versions of chemical process simulators used for chemical process design and development. While the approach targeted heavy oil and bitumen applications as a lead application, it has also been adopted by the bio-fuels, product/materials design and pharmaceutics communities. Two topics, that we expect to be equally successful, are elaborated in this proposal: the development of phase behaviour and, rheological models, for nano structured fluids based on the behaviour of networks of gold and silica based nanoparticles to which diverse organic ligands are attached. Computed and measured IR and RAMAN spectra where inter and intra molecular effects are discriminated, will be used to identify the nature and strength of inter particle (inter ligand) association, in relation to shear rheology measurements. Phase diagrams resulting from depletion flocculation and other nanoscopic phenomena will be explored using a custom view cell equipped with acoustic acoustic array telemetry. While our focus is the elucidation of such phenomena in hydrocarbon energy sector, nanofluidic dispersions comprise an emerging area. The initial results and their impacts are expected to arise in diverse industries and for applications where liquid feeds intermediates or products may include nano-particulates. Examples range from heat transfer fluids, contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging. Applications within the hydrocarbon resource industry, an industry of strategic importance to Canada, where crude oils, bitumen, their partially processed products, and waste water from mined oilsands operations all include nanostructured or nano-particulate constituents are expected to arise later.