Analysis of Crystallization of Paraffin Wax by Using Avrami Kinetic Model and LFRA

For many years, deposition of paraffin wax in oil and gas pipelines has been the major problems in petroleum industries that mostly related to pump, wax blockage in pipelines and equipments failure. The objectives of this work are to study the effect of certain parameters such as temperature differential, different wax compositions and different type of solvents towards wax crystallization and also to understand tl1e effects against wax properties itself such as hardness, break load, adhesiveness and viscosity that LFRA Texture Analyzer and viscometer could produce. The kinetics and mechanism of wax crystallization is further studied in accordance to A vrarni Theory. For the experiment of investigating the effect of temperature differential, there will be two fixed parameters which are fixed T min and Fixed T max· The wax compositions used is fixed which is 17%. Firstly the Tmm is fixed to zoe while the Tmax varied from 60, 70 to 80°C. Secondly, the Tmax is fixed to 70°C and the Tmm varied from 5, 10 to l5°C. For the experiment the effect of wax compositions, the wax compositions is varied from 5, 10, 15 to 20% and diesel is used as the model-oil. Lastly, for the experiment the effect of different types of solvents, four different solvents are used which are diesel, heptanes, hexane and octane. The wax compositions used is fixed which is I 7%. The results indicate that for temperature differential have two opposite effects on the results of wax deposition: For fixed Tmm, wax deposition and the viscosity decreasing as tl1e temperature difference increasing; for fixed T max, wax deposition and the viscosity are increasing as the temperature difference increasing. For the second experiment, the wax deposition and the viscosity are increasing with the increase of the wax composition and this is well expected. As for the experiment of different types of solvents, the wax deposition is highest in the diesel but for the other solvent, as tl1e carbon chain number is increasing from hexane, heptanes to octane, the wax deposition and the viscosity is decreasing. The growth rate, K is increasing while the A vrami exponent, n is decreasing as the wax deposition is increasing. For the LFRA texture analysis, the hardness and tl1e break load is increasing with the increase of the wax deposition while the adllesive force is decreasing as the wax deposition is increasing