Researchers from Tomsk Polytechnic University are developing physical and methodological foundations for creating an analyzer to monitor the level of hazardous organochlorine compounds released during industrial production and pipeline transportation of oil and gas. These compounds cause corrosion of equipment. The analyzers will help extend the lifetime of the equipment and reduce maintenance costs. The latest research findings were published in Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy (Q1, IF: 4.831). The research project is supported by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of the Priority 2030 program.
Organochlorine compounds are present in crude oil, oil products, and chemicals. They corrode equipment and contaminate catalysts. This leads to equipment failure and adversely affects production processes in general. More to the point, when it comes to pipeline transportation of oil, it can lead to an environmental disaster in case of a pipeline rupture as well as to enormous incident response losses.
“Today, oil and gas enterprises do not use analyzers for in-process monitoring of organochlorine compounds content in crude oil, oil products, and gas condensate. The creation of such a device could solve a number of problems at once: extend the life of expensive equipment, save billions on its repair or replacement, and address the environmental threats caused by damaged equipment.
However, finding and efficient solution to this problem implies understanding what, where, how, and by what method to probe, and most importantly, conducting a series of fundamental research and experiments to study the substances to be traced,” Oleg Ulenekov, professor at the TPU Research School of High-Energy Physics, explains.
The future analyzer will be designed to search and quantify four substances: dichloromethane, chloroform, chloromethane, and carbon tetrachloride. They will be analyzed using the methods of high-resolution spectroscopy. The instrument will ensure high-precision measurement and real-time result. The TPU researchers will use a database of macro parameters, which has been compiled by the research team for 30 years, to obtain data on the quantitative content of organochlorine compounds.
“In order to determine the composition and amount of a harmful impurity in oil, we need to know the so called effective dipole moment parameters for the vibrational-rotational bands of the substances being probed. These various spectrum characteristics are crucial for the instrument design. However, in the global science, there is no information available on the high-resolution spectra of the three out of the four mentioned methane chlorides.
In this work, we rely on our own vast experience with the spectra of molecules of the same ‘families’ that our research team has been studying for many years. For this purpose, we adjust mathematical software and modify the methods of spectrum analysis,”
adds Oleg Ulenekov.
As part of the research, the TPU team in collaboration with their colleagues from Germany and France conducts high-precision experimental studies of the spectra of all methane chlorides. Using special spectrometers, they study the main absorption bands of each molecule, determine the rotational structure of the main vibrational states as well as the eigenvalues and functions of all four molecules’ effective operators.
The research project will take two years. First, the researchers will modify mathematical models to study the molecular energy structure of harmful substances and, based on them, will improve algorithms and software. Then, they will provide recommendations for creating the instrument itself to determine the quantitative composition of substances in mixtures.