Billions of dollars are spent annually on cleaning clogged pipelines in the oil industry. Asphaltenes are macromolecules indigenous to crude oil known to be the primary cause of such clogging due to their tendency to aggregate. Majority of previous work has focused on the mixture of asphaltenes, and the role of resin molecules is not well known in the aggregation process. Molecular level understanding of the aggregation process will provide insight in alleviating its economic and environmental costs. We performed a molecular dynamics study on the aggregation of a set of model asphaltene molecules to gain atomistic insight on the effect of each molecular feature in asphaltene molecules on their aggregation behavior. Our results reveal that asphaltenes with different molecular features have dissimilar tendency to aggregate. Likewise, we investigated the effect of resins with comparable molecular features to asphaltenes on their aggregation behavior. Majority of the resins we studied have a deterring effect on the aggregation of asphaltenes. Resins with similar characteristics to asphaltene tend to interact with their counterpart asphaltenes directly and interrupt aggregation of asphaltenes through limiting their pi-pi stacking and therefore their aggregation.

Deterring effect of resins on the aggregation of asphaltene molecules in n-heptane

256th National Meeting (2018)

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