PHOTO-OXIDATION OF CRUDE OILS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Changes with elapsed time are presented for five kinds of oils that were studied through the analyses of GLC method, where particularly we made an attempt to examine the relationship among specific gravity, viscosity, and the amount of water in oils. Furthermore, we tried to evaluate a few processes of various kinds of changes on the physical and chemical properties of oils such as evaporation, biodegradation, and photo-decomposition. The evaporation process was found to affect mainly paraffins with smaller boiling points, below the number of C12-C13, for 21 days, while due to the action of marine bacteria, normal paraffins were effectively degraded (ca. 50%) after 15 days except for branched ones. Moreover, it was also found that the aromatic hydrocarbons with anthracene ring and heteroaromatic ones, which were not easily decomposed by the processes mentioned above, were fairly decomposed by photo-irradiation for 10 hours.