abstract
Polyethers are a family of compounds of interest for the oil industry: glycols are known by their application as dehydration agents while glymes have gained the interest from both industry and academia as feasible candidates for gas separations. However, their characterization is still poor, hindering the development and optimization of novel separation processes. This work aims at demonstrating the soft-SAFT reliability that, when combined with a limited number of experiments, can provide a way for systematic studies on the performance of physical solvents for gas processing technologies. A recently developed, consistent, reliable and transferable molecular model for polyethers in the framework of soft-SAFT, is here applied for the first time to model the vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) of glymes + CH4/CO2. Moreover, the same model is shown to be able to accurately describe the VLE of aqueous solutions of polyethers. © 2018 Society of Exploration Geophysicists.
keywords
Dehydration; Gas producers; Gasoline; Phase equilibria; Polyethers; Solutions; Alternative solvents; Gas processing; Gas separations; Novel separation process; Oil industries; Physical solvent; Systematic study; Ethers
authors
Crespo, EA; Carvalho, PJ; Coutinho, JAP; Vega, LF
our authors
Projects
CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials (UID/CTM/50011/2013)
Projeto de Investigação Exploratória: Pedro Carvalho (IF/00758/2015)
acknowledgements
This work was developed in the scope of the project CICECO – Aveiro Institute of Materials, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007679 (Ref. FCT UID/CTM/50011/2013) funded by FEDER through COMPETE2020 – Programa Operacional Competividade e Internacionalização (POCI) and by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. This work was funded by PARTEX OIL & GAS. P. J. Carvalho acknowledges FCT for a contract under the Investigador FCT 2015, contract IF/00758/2015 and E. A. Crespo for the PhD grant SFRH/BD/130870/2017.