When dealing with conversion of heavy oils and bitumen, viscosity determination plays a significant role. Changes in this property show the effect of manipulating the operating conditions and/or the reaction chemistry during upgrading, which has direct bearing on pipeline transport of upgraded bitumen. In conceptual engineering design, reliable calculated viscosity values are needed and absolute viscosity values may influence design decisions as well as estimated process economics. Furthermore, the selection of mixing rules is restricted to those ones that allow the calculation of the mixture viscosity using only the feed viscosity and composition as input. Little information on the performance of mixing rules for bitumen viscosity at low dilution was available. In addition, there was no guideline for selecting an appropriate mixing rule to predict low dilution mixture viscosity, or provide an indication of the associated uncertainty. In this study, these shortcomings were addressed. The viscosity and density of mixtures of Athabasca bitumen and six different solvents was measured at 30, 40, and 60 °C and atmospheric pressure. In all cases, low dilution was employed, i.e. solvent concentration was in the range 1-10 wt%. The evaluation was restricted to predictive binary mixing rules that required only bitumen and solvent properties, and that did not require parameter regression. The predictive performance of the binary mixing rules for viscosity was evaluated. It was found that the mixing rules generally resulted in overestimation of viscosity compared to experimentally measured viscosity. The simple expression, log log (νm+0.7) = Σ wi [log log (νi+0.7)], and that by Miadonye et al. (Pet Sci Technol 2000; 18:1–14) consistently gave better viscosity estimation than the other mixing rules, with an absolute average relative deviation (AARD) of ~30 %.

Viscosity of bitumen at low dilution: Selection of binary mixing rules and estimates of uncertainty

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

[Author Benefits](https://scimeetings.acs.org/?utm_source=pubs_content_marketing&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=0320_MCF_NPI_Launch_Spring_Homepage&ref=pubs_content_marketing)

[How to use SciMeetings](https://storage.googleapis.com/dl.morressier.com/acs/SciMeetings-ACSSpring2020-HowToGuide_M3020-Final.pdf)

[Frequently Asked Questions](https://storage.googleapis.com/dl.morressier.com/acs/SciMtng_ACSNMSp2020_FAQ_M3120_Final.pdf)

ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.