Blends of surfactants and EVA as cold flow improvers for diesel fuels

Abstract

The content and carbon number distribution of n-alkanes in diesel samples was analyzed using gas chromatography (GC). This paper describes one kind of commercial ethylene/vinyl acetate (EVA) additive for evaluating the sensitivity of four diesel samples. The influence of surfactants added alone or compounded with EVA on the cold flow plugging point (CFPP) was determined to investigate the collaborative effect. The results indicated that the susceptibility of diesel samples was according to the following order: 2(#), 3(#), 1(#) and 4(#), and the synergistic effect of surfactants combined with EVA was excellent. To further the development of surfactants as cold flow improvers, the performance mechanism was studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The results show that the crystallization energy of wax crystals had different degrees of decline with the use of the additive surfactants, through measuring the thermal effects using DSC.