Experimental Setups for Studying the Compatibility of Crude Oil Blends under Dynamic Conditions

Blending of different crude oils is currently carried out in the petroleum industry. However, under certain process conditions, i.e., pressure, temperature, flow regime, composition, etc., asphaltene precipitation and plugging of pipelines and process equipment commonly occur, which cause production shutdowns; therefore, special cleaning programs need to be developed. To avoid these problems, it is first necessary to evaluate the compatibility of crude oil blends through a study of asphaltene stability. Most of the available tests are focused on analyzing crude oils under standard conditions, i.e., temperature, pressure, solvent/oil ratio, or static testing; however, studies at dynamic conditions are scarce. Dynamic testing is a more representative approach to correlate experimental information with data of transportation of crude oils, where pressure, temperature, and flow regimes influence crude oil stability and compatibility. In this work, the literature reports of dynamic experimental setups are summarized and analyzed, whereby asphaltene deposition and precipitation are typically studied.