Mixing of Crude Oil with Near-Critical/Supercritical Water Using Crude Pseudo-Components

We investigate the mixing process of a crude oil droplet in a bulk of near-critical water or supercritical water. The crude oil is modeled using three pseudo-components, and the non-ideal diffusive driving force is used in this study. The heavy oil fractions are observed to concentrate in the center of the crude droplet in high temperatures (>640K), and a newly emerged heavy crude-rich phase is separated from the original crude-rich phase. This phenomenon is expected due to the highly non-ideal diffusive driving force as revealed in our previous study. This work is the first numerical study to report the phase separation of heavy oil fractions from light oil fractions in mixing with supercritical water.