Modeling of heats of combustion and shale oil yields in oil shale semicoking

Abstract

15 Oil shale is a promising source for power generation and chemical production. Information on the proper ties and chemical composition of oil shale mined from various deposits has been summarized in [1]. Among the oil shale properties, heats of combustion and shale oil yields in oil shale semicoking as a function of com position, different in different deposits, are of great practical interest. In this work, we made an attempt to model these properties as a function of chemical com position of oil shale. In searching for quantitative structure–property relationships (QSPR [2–4]) for organic compounds, topological indices are commonly used [5, 6]. How ever, in our case, the structures of all compounds con stituting oil shale are unknown; therefore, only the elemental composition of oil shale was used as descriptors. Only the contents of C, H, N, S, and organic substances reported in [1] were taken into account. Table 1 presents the characteristics of oil shale samples from different deposits, and Table 2 summa rizes information on their chemical composition [1, pp. 140–143]. It is worth noting that data in [1] are expressed in different units: for S, in percentage of the CHEMISTRY