Patent ID: 7904251
Filing Date: 2011-03-08
Classification: G01N

Abstract:
1. A method for generating an assay of an unknown material including a whole crude oil or a portion of a whole crude oil comprising: a) generating a synthetic assay of the unknown material which provides distillation yield as a function of boiling point, wherein said synthetic assay is generated by the steps of determining an IR spectrum of said material, fitting said IR spectrum to a linear combination of known IR spectra in a database to determine the coefficients of the linear combination, wherein the database includes IR spectra of reference crude oils whose distillation yield as a function of boiling point are known, and determining the distillation yield as a function of boiling point of said material from the coefficients of the linear combination and the boiling range fraction yields of the reference crudes, b) measuring one or more critical property of the unknown material, c) selecting a known surrogate assay for each of the critical properties to provide a property distribution for each critical property wherein said property distribution is a function of boiling point, d) calculating a material balanced value for each critical property which gives the total amount of the critical property in said unknown material, e) adjusting the property distributions from step c) such that the material balanced property values equal the measured property values from step b), f) replacing the property distributions of the synthetic assay with the adjusted property distributions of step e).