Transcripción del resumen del autor. The deposition of wax on subsea oil pipelines is one of the major economic concerns that currently faces the petroleum industry. These deposits are a wax-oil gel, where solid wax crystals form a volume-spanning network while trapping liquid crude oil. Although significant research on an industrial and academic level has been dedicated to developing proper additives to weaken or break the deposit, little work has been devoted to understanding how the composition of the oil itself affects the formation of this wax-oil gel. This work focuses on the gelation characteristics of long-chained n-alkanes (primary component of wax deposits) in a short-chained n-alkane solvent. Adding other crystallizable n-alkanes can greatly inhibit the ability of a gel to form, even though the amount of wax present has been increased. Cocrystallization inhibits the formation of a gel by developing weaknesses in the crystal structure as a result of accommodating the shorter n-alkane into the crystal structure of the longer n-alkane. Even if the components are unable to cocrystallize, gel inhibition can occur when the shorter n-alkane associates with the longer n-alkane and prevents the longer n-alkanes from interacting with one another. However, these effects cannot be seen until a sufficient amount of the shorter n-alkane has been added, at which point the gelation temperature drops significantly. These conclusions have been validated using cross-polarized microscopy. Further work has also investigated the effect of even and odd carbon numbers on the gelation characteristics.

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