Estimation of Physical Properties and Composition of Hydrocarbon Mixtures

Abstract

Economical and optimum design and operation of refinery units and related industry largely depend on accurate values of thermodynamic and physical properties of related fluid mixtures used in process simulations. Thermodynamic and physical properties are also known as thermophysical or simply physical properties and include but not limited to PVT (density), phase equilibrium (equilibrium ratios), thermal properties (i.e., enthalpy, heat capacity), and transport properties (i.e., viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion coefficients and interfacial tension). In petroleum production, reservoir engineers use these properties in reservoir simulation to calculate rate of oil production. Physical properties are state functions and for every fluid depend on temperature, pressure and composition of the mixture. As experimental determination of these properties for every hydrocarbon mixture under different conditions is prohibitive in both time and cost, prediction and estimation of these properties become increasingly important.