Physical properties of wax deposits on the walls of crude pipelines

Abstract

Wax deposits on the wall of a crude oil pipeline are a solid wax network of fine crystals, filled with oil, resin, asphaltene and other impurities. In this paper, a series of experiments on wax deposition in a laboratory flow loop were performed under different conditions (flow rate, temperature differential between crude oil and pipeline wall, and dissolved wax concentration gradient), and the wax deposits were analyzed, so quantitative relationships among wax content, wax appearance temperature (WAT), shear stress, and radial concentration gradient of dissolved wax at the solid/liquid interface were obtained. Finally, a model was established to predict WAT and the wax content of the deposit. © China University of Petroleum (Beijing) and Springer-Verlag GmbH 2009.