About the Colloidal Nature of Asphaltenes and the MW of Covalent Monomeric Units
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problems surrounding molecular aggregation, covalent molecular weight, and their experimental investigation in asphaltene chemistry are reviewed. Chromatographic, fluorescence spectroscopic, and mass spectroscopic (MS) methods for the investigation of these problems are surveyed and their merits and limitations discussed. Dissociation of asphaltene in dilute solution can be followed in time by monitoring the gel permeation retention time variation with the age of the solution. This way, Athabasca asphaltene was reported to dissociate from several thousand to less than about 1000 g mol - 1 molecular weight (MW) species in CH 2 Cl 2 solution to an extent of at least 80% in 14 days' time. The dissociation products represent the monomeric covalent molecules of asphaltene, and the remaining undissociated 20% could be slowly dissociating aggregates or high-MW covalent asphaltenes. The vapor pressure osmometry (VPO) determined number average MW of the same asphaltene was of the order of 4000 g mol - 1, manifesting the aggregated state of the asphaltene at the higher concentrations used for VPO measurements. Of the MS methods, the most thoroughly investigated and proposed to be the best suited to asphaltene studies are the laser desorption ionization/matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (LDI, MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) MS. However, results obtained from various laboratories do not compare well; in some cases the bulk of the m / z lies below 1000, and in others it lies well above m / z 1000. 252 Cf plasma desorption MS data are more self-consistent in the sense that the bulk of m / z values always lie below m / z 1000. The upper m / z limit in most cases is around a few thousand m / z but may extend up to tens of thousands m / z . The problems affecting these methods for the determination of covalent, monomeric asphaltene MW distributions are fragmentation of covalent bonds, multiple ionization, and the production of cluster ions. Fluorescence-based methods are not suitable for MW measurements in asphaltene; the reasons for this are discussed in detail.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".