Estimation of sulfur content of petroleum products and crude oils

In this paper simple estimation methods are presented to predict sulfur wei ght percentage in petroleum fractions and crude oils. Input data needed to use this method are molecular weight, refractive index, and specific gravit y (SG). In cases in which molecular weight and refractive index are not ava ilable they can be estimated from the boiling point and SG of the fraction using appropriate methods. For crude oils, the C7+ part of the crude mixtur e was split into several pseudocompounds using the two-parameter distributi on model proposed by Riazi (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1997, 36, 4299-4307), and then for each fraction sulfur content was determined. The sulfur content of crude was then determined from its carbon number distribution (or boiling point distribution) and the estimated sulfur content of each pseudocompound . For 132 different fuels and petroleum products with molecular weight rang ing from 75 to 1500 and sulfur contents up to 6%, an average deviation of a bout 0.15% was obtained to estimate sulfur weight percentage from the propo sed method. For seven crude oils with sulfur contents up to 2.4%, the propo sed methods gave an average deviation of 0.31%.