Measurements and Modelling of Phase Behaviour and Viscosity of a Heavy Oil/Butane System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Solvent-based heavy oil recovery methods are of interest as environmentally friendly alternatives for thermal techniques. The phase behaviour data from a heavy oil/solvent system are important information required for feasibility studies and numerical simulation of such processes. The scarcity of experimental data in the literature is a challenge in modelling of solvent involving processes. The variety of the solvent/oil mixtures, which are being evaluated within ongoing researches such as the VAPEX (vapour extraction of heavy oil) process, requires accurate description of the system's pressure, volume and temperature (PVT) properties. In this study, an experimental setup was designed to perform a series of PVT experiments and viscosity measurements. The results of the PVT tests conducted with the Frog Lake heavy oil and butane as a solvent are presented. The same oil/solvent pair was used in the VAPEX experiments previously reported by the authors(1, 2). The measurements include the solvent solubility in the oil, mixture density and mixture viscosity at different saturation pressures. To simulate the phase behaviour of the system, an equation of state (EOS) was tuned using the measured experimental data and a phase behaviour package (WINPROP). The predicted densities and saturation pressures by the EOS are in very good agreement with the experimental data. A mixing viscosity correlation was also tuned with the measured data and found to be representative for describing the viscosity of the system. The viscosity data were compared with the predictions of several other available correlations, and it was shown that Shu's model(3) reproduces acceptable data for reservoir simulation purposes. Introduction Solvent-involving recovery processes have recently gained some attention. These processes often involve relatively light hydrocarbon solvents such as C3 - C7, which are sometimes co-injected with non-condensable gases such as CO2, CH4 and N2. Numerical simulation studies of such processes are, however, in early stages to investigate the feasibility of field implementation, improvement and optimization. Numerical modelling of these processes is mostly performed on compositional simulators to capture the potential compositional changes, asphaltene precipitation and diffusion/dispersion mechanisms. Phase behaviour of the heavy oil/solvent system is one of the most vital pieces of input data that can be predicted and produced by either a series of k values or a tuned EOS. Nonetheless, both methods rely on accurate experimental phase behaviour information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".