WAT-70Xi: Wax Appearance Temperature

With a long, notable history as the world leader in developing test methods for cold flow properties detection, Phase Technology has now extended its capability to include a critical measurement for crude oil: Wax Appearance Temperature (WAT).

Also known as cloud point, wax appearance temperature is the temperature at which a crude oil sample first precipitates solid wax as it is being cooled under prescribed test conditions.

Similarly, Wax Disappearance Temperature (WDT) is the temperature at which the last wax solids are melted into liquid during a warming cycle.

Until now, trying to determine crude oil WAT or cloud point was an imprecise, tedious, and subjective process. Various manual methods have been tried, but all are difficult and timeconsuming, yielding results with unacceptably wide error margins.

Phase Technology’s WAT-70Xi analyzer revolutionizes the upstream, midstream oil and marine fuel industries with the world’s first and only fully automatic process to measure WAT and WDT of crude and marine fuel oils. Following ASTM D8420 method, our proprietary optical light scattering technique detects phase changes with extreme sensitivity and accuracy.

This important scientific break-through means that even the darkest, most opaque samples can now be easily tested, with 1.0° C precision. The Phase Technology WAT-70Xi offers a considerable efficiency advantage—just load the sample, and the analyzer does the rest, with tests completed in just 20-40 minutes. There’s no time-consuming manual set-up needed, and cleaning is done automatically after each test.

Benefits:

• Detection of both WAT and WDT – two critical tests for understanding crude and marine fuel oil behavior.
• Faster than any other test method – results in just 20-40 minutes, compared to average test times of several hours for other methods.
• Tests opaque samples – enhanced optical configuration “sees” through dark samples.
• Self cleaning – automatic solvent flush after each test run.
• No manual set up – simply inject sample directly into analyzer and being test run.
• Superior precision – repeatability of 1.0°C
• Greater sensitivity – controlled, automatic test method ensures no subjectivity in reported results.
• Informative, real-time test results – complete phase diagram (loop) clearly illustrates WAT, relative amount of wax formation and WDT.