Abstract
THE use of tritiated water as a radioactive tracer to study the solubility of water in hydrocarbons clearly offers many advantages, especially the fact that low concentrations of water in a hydrocarbon can be easily and accurately assayed by liquid scintillation counting. We have adopted this technique to make a closer study of how well Henry's Law is obeyed for such a system. Black, Joris and Taylor 1,2 used tritium with a gas counting technique for a similar investigation and assumed, along with others3, that Henry's Law was followed up to saturation point. In the discussion of the latter paper3 some evidence was put forward to suggest that substantial deviations from Henry's Law were observed for water dissolved in hydrocarbon fuels. More recently Englin et al. 4 have published results substantiating the original assumptions. The work described below using the more sensitive techniques of liquid scintillation counting of HTO as a tracer is claimed to be the most accurate study of the water-hydrocarbon system to date.
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References
Joris, G. G., and Taylor, H. S., J. Chem. Phys., 16, 45 (1948).
Black, C., Joris, G. G., and Taylor, H. S., J. Chem. Phys., 16, 537 (1948).
Davies, P. L., Fourth World Petroleum Congress Section V/E, 427 (1955).
Englin, B. A., Tuglolukov, V. M., Sakodynskaya T. P., Khimiya i Tekhnologiya Topliva, 11, 43 (1956).
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CADDOCK, B., DAVIES, P. Use of Tritium to Study the Solubility of Water in Hydrocarbons. Nature 184, 2011 (1959). https://doi.org/10.1038/1842011a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1842011a0
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