The effect of aging on critical carbon number (CCN) during wax deposition analysis

The process of aging is a critical carbon number (CCN) exists in counter diffusion phenomenon. In the wax deposition phenomenon, the wax molecules with carbon numbers higher than the critical carbon number (CCN) will diffuse into the gel matrices and vice versa in aging process during experiments. The petroleum industry has major problem which is wax deposition that causes the hindrance in subsea pipelines. The experiment of aging of wax deposition was carried out with time and temperature by using cold finger device. Furthermore, the analysis of carbon number distribution was performed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) carefully. In this analysis, when the time increases from 2 to 24 hours, the higher carbon number and wax contents in deposition was increases. The aging of wax deposition caused the increasing in the hardness of deposit. In addition, the higher temperature provides effective outcome on the wax content and little outcome on critical carbon numbers (CCN). The bulk oil temperature was used to determine the hardness of the deposit. The CCN of wax deposit is 18.