A fundamental study, was carried out to understand the aging (or hardening)
of the wax-oil gels formed in the subsea pipelines during the flow of crud
e oil from offshore wells to shore. The aging process is a counterdiffusion
phenomenon where there exists a critical carbon number (CCN), and wax mole
cules with carbon numbers greater than the CCN diffuse into the gel matrice
s and vice versa. Using a careful analysis of carbon number distributions o
f gel deposits, collected from a cold finger after various deposition time
intervals, the CCN for the wax-oil system was obtained. A mathematical mode
l, based on a modified version of UNIQUAC model, was developed to predict t
he CCN for wax-oil systems. The size of the interaction units for n-alkanes
in the solid-phase UNIQUAC model was found to be a strong function of the
mean carbon number in the solid phase.