Wax deposits in oil pipelines can reduce the effective inner diameter of such pipelines, which may lead to pipeline blockage accidents. In this study, a cold finger experimental device was constructed, and eight groups of experimental scenarios under cold flow conditions were performed in accordance with field conditions. The effects of deposition time and cold and hot bath temperatures on wax deposition were investigated. Results show that when the cold bath temperature remains unchanged, and only the hot bath temperature increases, the deposition quality and rate of mixed waxy crude oil will initially decrease and then increase. During this period, the temperature that corresponds to the maximum deposition mass is the starting point of the wax precipitation peak.

The main methods of treating oily sludge at home and abroad and the current research status of oily sludge pyrolysis technology are briefly described, and four commonly used catalysts are introduced: metals, metal compounds, molecular sieves, metal-supported molecular sieves, and biomass catalysts for oily sludge. The influence of pyrolysis, the pyrolysis mechanism, and the product composition of oily sludge with the addition of different catalysts are also discussed. Finally, the development direction of preparing new catalysts and the mixed use of multiple catalysts is proposed as a theory to provide for the efficient and reasonable utilization of oily sludge.

Research shows that the viscosity greatly reduction of viscous crude oil can improve the exploitation and promote the fluidity. We studied the effects and the mechanism of viscosity reduction of viscous crude oil emulsion after introducing the ternary compound of sulfonate-straight chain alcohol-alkaline as the viscosity reducer. Results showed that the best emulsifying performance can be achieved using 5% 1-pentanol. 0.2% of Na₂CO₃ and DEA shows the strongest emulsification ability of the O/W emulsion. The use of AOS, straight chain alcohol and petroleum carboxylate resolves diffusion on the oil-water interface, which can form a dense surfactant of single molecular layer to reduce the interfacial tension and prevent the phase change of the emulsification. When the mass fraction of AOS, Na₂CO₃, DEA and 1-pentanol were 0.2%, 0.25%, 0.2% and 5% respectively, the viscous crude oil would achieve the best effect of viscosity reduction.

The leakage aperture cannot be easily identified, when an oil pipeline has small leaks. To address this issue, a leak aperture recognition method based on wavelet packet analysis (WPA) and a deep belief network (DBN) with independent component regression (ICR) is proposed. WPA is used to remove the noise in the collected sound velocity of the ultrasonic signal. Next, the denoised sound velocity of the ultrasonic signal is input into the deep belief network with independent component regression (DBN_ICR) to recognize different leak apertures. Because the optimization of the weights of the DBN with the gradient leads to a local optimum and a slow learning rate, ICR is used to replace the gradient fine‐tuning method in conventional DBN for improving the classification accuracy, and a Lyapunov function is constructed to prove the convergence of the DBN_ICR learning process. By analyzing the acquired ultrasonic sound velocity of different leak apertures, the results show that the proposed method can quickly and effectively identify different leakage apertures.

This study establishes an insulation crude oil pipeline wax deposition experimental device and describes the experimental method for insulation crude oil pipeline wax deposition. The experimental program is based on the operational plan of Tieling–Huludao insulation crude oil pipeline. The data are analyzed according to the effect of varying oil temperature, insulation thickness, and flow on wax deposition. Using SPSS software, a Daqing crude oil wax deposition rate model is derived from the linear regression. The use of the wax deposition rate model forecasts the wax deposition of the Tieling–Huludao insulation crude oil pipeline during different seasons.

Based on the theory that viscous crude oil can form stable two-phase oil-water interfacial molecular membrane with surfactant, the oil-water interfacial activity and viscosity reduction of oil-water interface of viscous crude oil were studied for the ternary compound system, including anionic surfactant alpha olefin sulfonate (AOS), weak alkali Na₂CO₃ and four different kinds of nonionic surfactant emulsifying silicon oil (LKR-1023), lauryl diethanolamide (LDEA), isomeric alcohol ethoxylates (E-1306), and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate (T-80). Results showed when lipophilic or hydrophilic nonionic surfactants were used separately in the same compound system. The viscosity of viscous crude oil could be reduced, but the viscosity reduction efficacy was not desirable. However, using LKR-1023, E-1306, and T-80 as nonionic surfactant with mass fraction 1.0%, the viscosity reduction rate of viscous crude oil reaches 98.92%, 98.29%, and 96.87%, respectively. With 1.4% of LDEA, the viscosity reduction rate of viscous crude oil can reach 98.89%. Through all different kinds of the nonionic surfactant tested, oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion under LDEA ternary compound system has been proved to be the most stable with no phase inversion. Therefore, it is promising to improve the viscosity reduction of the super viscous crude oil by selecting the proper surfactant and dosage.