Predicting water-hydrocarbon systems mutual solubility

Describing the mutual solubilities of hydrocarbons and water is very important in the energy industry. The presence of water in a hydrocarbon mixture can affect the product quality and damage the operation equipment due to corrosion and formation of gas hydrates. Tracing the concentration of hydrocarbons in aqueous media is also important for technical purposes like preventing oil spills and for ecological concerns such as predicting the fate of these organic pollutants in the environment. Over the past three decades, a number of difficult thermodynamic approaches to the description of the mutual solubilities of hydrocarbons and water have been attempted. However, there was no easy-to-use model available for a qualitative description of the mutual solubility of water and hydrocarbons for a broad range of systems, over a wide range of thermodynamic conditions. This paper presents an easy-to-use correlation for an excellent prediction of the mutual solubility of water-hydrocarbon systems in a broad range of temperatures between 0 and 120 °C, and heavy hydrocarbons between C3 and C10. The average absolute deviation from available data is 3 %.