An investigation on the sensitivity analysis of the parameters of proposed wax precipitation model

Reservoir hydrocarbon fluids contain heavy paraffins that may form solid phase of wax at low temperatures. Formation of solid phases is highly unwanted in oil production assemblies, pipelines and in process equipments. A predictive technique is crucial to the solution of wax formation to alleviate this problem.The effect of different parameters to predict the conditions under which wax precipitation takes place using the proposed model of Sahand University of Technology and other models has been investigated. The proposed model uses regular solution theory to describe solid phase (wax) non-ideality and the liquid and gas phases are being described by an equation of state.In order to evaluate the reliability of the proposed model, wax appearance temperatures (WAT's) were calculated for several mixtures at different compositions and compared with different models. The proposed model predictions had very good agreement with experimental data over a wide range of compositional distributions in comparison with other models. Solid wax content was also calculated at different temperatures below WAT in several synthetic systems made up of a solvent (decane) and a paraffinic heavy fraction. The results of calculating the amount of wax precipitation showed very good agreement with experimental data. Effect of different parameters including fusion temperature (Tf), Enthalpy of fusion (Δhf), solubility parameter (δS), and binary interaction parameters (BIP) in predicting the WAT and the amount of wax precipitated for different oil mixtures have been evaluated using the proposed model and compared with other models. The results showed that the Tf is the most sensitive parameter while δS shows the least sensitivity in matching the WAT. Even though using Δhf could provide the same results as tuning Tf, but the required changes are much higher and sometimes not practical. Also using BIP as the tuning parameter, requires a fairly large coefficient that makes it unsuitable to be considered as the tuning parameter.