The aggregation and diffusion of asphaltenes studied by GPU-accelerated dissipative particle dynamics

The heavy crude oil consists of thousands of compounds and much of them have large molecular weights and complex structures. Studying the aggregation and diffusion behavior of asphaltenes can facilitate the understanding of the heavy crude oil. In previous studies, the fused aromatic rings were treated as rigid bodies so that dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) integrated with the quaternion method can be used to study asphaltene systems. In this work, DPD integrated with the quaternion method is implemented on graphics processing units (GPUs). Compared with the serial program, tens of times speedup can be achieved when simulations performed on a single GPU. Using multiple GPUs can provide faster computation speed and more storage space for simulations of significant large systems. By using large systems, simulations of the asphaltene–toluene system at extremely dilute concentrations can be performed. The determined diffusion coefficients of asphaltenes are similar to that in experimental studies. At last, the aggregation behavior of asphaltenes in heptane was investigated, and the simulation results agreed with the modified Yen model. Monomers, nanoaggregates and clusters were observed from the simulations at different concentrations. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.