Modeling of Base Oil Blends

Sammanfattning: Nynas AB is a company that refines oil  for different applications such as insulating oils  for the electrical industry and base oils for both the lubricant and chemical industry. Different types of base oils are produced for the lubricant industry in order to provide required properties such as good viscosity, solvency, volatility, etc. But sometimes, the oils produced in the refineries (known as “straight cut” oils) do not have the all properties required by a customer, and a way for achieving those properties is to blend different straight cut base oils. To save money and time, empirical correlations are used to facilitate the prediction of the properties of those blends.Those correlations are adapted to products from a single site produced from certain crude oils. The company has recently decided to introduce a new stream of products with different characteristics, which means that the new properties of the products and blends can not be predicted by using the existing empirical correlations. The objective of this project was to analyze blends containing these new products and find the new correlations. The names of the oils are classified information and were renamed in the report and also number of the tables with result in appendices has been reduced to protect Nynas AB.  The correlations were surprisingly good for most of the blends. The differences between the values obtained by the blending program (which was calculating the properties) and the experimental values were very small. But the calculated values for properties such as flash point and pour point, were quite different from the experimental ones for some of the samples. Finally, there was one type of blends, between the Naphthenic oil 2 (N 2) and Paraffinic oil B (P (B)), were it was not possible to get any results with the blending program, because the viscosities at 40 °C of those oils (N 2 and P(B)) were too similar. As mentioned before, the property that was most difficult to predict was the pour point, specially for blends containing paraffinic oil blend with a naphtenic oil. However, suggestions were made based on the experimental values of how to get correlations based on. Anyhow, empirical correlations were developed based on the experimental data.