Feedstock and Product Characterization

For any rigorous model, success requires detailed, accurate feedstock and product characterizations. For the HCC and hydrocacker, GC/MS, H NMR, NMR, HPLC, and standard ASTM methods were used to analyze a battery of feedstock and product samples. The analytical results were used to generate base-case distributions for the components used in the models and to tune reaction kinetics. 

In the real world, feedstock properties and product slates are changing continually. In AFCC and AHYC, proprietary feed-adjust models skew the base-case component distribution to match the measured properties of feeds 

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Oil-sand(s) bitumen is one of the best characterized unconventional oils, with more than 30 years of exploration and research [2]. Several facets of the refinement processes of bitumen including the quantification of detrimental constituents (i.e., sulfur, nitrogen, and asphaltenes) in feedstock and product characterization feature the use of MS. 

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