Quantitative Evidence for Bridged Structures in Asphaltenes by Thin Film Pyrolysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thin film pyrolysis was used to thermally crack asphaltene molecules into their constituent building blocks at 500 °C. By using a thin film of liquid of ca. 20 μm, the cracked products were rapidly released into a much colder sweep gas stream to quench the reactions and minimize further decomposition. The liquid products were condensed and collected, with over 91% material balance on the recovery of gas, liquid, and coke product. Simulated distillation of the condensed liquid products showed a wide range of compounds with boiling points up to more than 700 °C produced in various stages of the reaction. Less than 1% of the original mass of the asphaltenes was released in the form of light gases such as methane and ethane. The liquid components boiling below 538 °C comprised 15–20% of the initial asphaltenes, and contained a wide range of chemical structures including paraffins, olefins, naphthenes, aromatics, thiophenes and sulfides, and nitrogen-containing compounds, identified by gas chromatography–field ionization–time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The ring groups were substituted with a range of alkyl side chains. Asphaltenes from a range of different crude oils gave similar results. The recovery of the building blocks was limited by the reaction conditions, because rereaction of the heavy products generated more light fragments. 13 C NMR spectroscopy of the feed and products of thermal cracking of C 7 asphaltenes showed a 10–26% increase in the aromatic or double-bonded carbon contents of the products compared to the feed, consistent with yields of toluene-insoluble coke in the range of 50%. The diverse components in the cracked products, with paraffins accounting for a small fraction of the total mass, are consistent with a significant concentration of complex structures attached by bridges in the asphaltene fraction.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".