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Updated: Mar 17, 2026

Determination of the Settling Rate of Clay/Cyanobacterial Floccules
Published on: June 11, 2018
Revisiting the flocculation kinetics of destabilized asphaltenes
Cláudio Vilas Bôas Fávero1, Tabish Maqbool2, Michael Hoepfner3
1Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2136, USA.
Abstract:
A comprehensive review of the recently published work on asphaltene destabilization and flocculation kinetics is presented. Four different experimental techniques were used to study asphaltenes undergoing flocculation process in crude oils and model oils. The asphaltenes were destabilized by different n-alkanes and a geometric population balance with the Smoluchowski collision kernel was used to model the asphaltene aggregation process. Additionally, by postulating a relation between the aggregation collision efficiency and the solubility parameter of asphaltenes and the solution, a unified model of asphaltene aggregation model was developed. When the aggregation model is applied to the experimental data obtained from several different crude oil and model oils, the detection time curves collapsed onto a universal single line, indicating that the model successfully captures the underlying physics of the observed process.
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