Measurements of water-heavy oil phase equilibrium for supercritical water upgrading process

A flow-type apparatus was developed to measure vapor-liquid phase equilibrium of water-heavy oil mixtures at high temperature and pressure conditions. The validity of the apparatus and experimental procedures were confirmed by measuring the vapor-liquid equilibrium of water-tetralin mixtures. For the phase equilibrium measurements of water-heavy oil at isothermal and isobaric conditions (603-653 K and 1.0-17 MPa), water was distributed more in the liquid phase by increase in pressure and/or decrease in temperature. At the isothermal condition, the effect of water/oil (W/O) ratio was almost negligible for the range from 1 to 4 g/g at any pressure conditions chosen in our study. During the experiments with controlling residence time, it was recognized that thermal decomposition of heavy oil could be also negligible within 30 min under the studied temperature conditions. From the experiments using the developed apparatus, we succeeded for acquirements of the fundamental data towards the practical process constructions.