| Oil will continue to be a major source of future non-renewable energy, and hence new cost-effective technologies for upgrading and recovery of conventional and unconventional oils are needed. This study presents a new environmentally sound and low-cost, yet highly efficient pyroxene nanoparticles (NaFeSi2O6, PY). Low temperature hydrothermal synthesis route was used to prepare different sized and surface-structural-modified PY nanoparticles, which were characterized by different characterization techniques like XRD, BET, FTIR, TGA, TPD-CO2, TPD-NH3, XPS, SEM and HRTEM. These nanoparticles were applied for the adsorptive removal of violanthrone-79 (VO-79) as an asphaltene model molecule. The adsorption isotherms were described by the Sips isotherm model. Similarly, the prepared nanoparticles were employed for the adsorptive removal of visbroken residue (VR-C5 ) asphaltenes, and the solid-liquid-equilibrium (SLE) model was used to describe the adsorption isotherms. The promising catalytic effect of PY nanoparticles towards adsorbed VR-C5 asphaltenes was investigated using TGA coupled with mass spectrometry. |
