The effect of NiO nanoparticle size was studied to understand its impact on adsorption and catalytic activity during oil recovery and upgrading. A series of different-sized NiO nanoparticles between 5 and 80 nm were prepared. XRD, BET, FTIR, HRTEM and TGA were used to characterize the nanosize effect on the textural properties, shape and morphology. Quinolin-65 (Q-65) was first used as an asphaltene model molecule. Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption isotherms models and computational modeling

more »

... r the interaction between NiO nanoparticle surface and Q-65 were carried out to understand the adsorption behavior. TGA/DTA and TGA-MS techniques were used to study the effect of NiO nanosizes on catalytic thermo-oxidative decomposition of the adsorbed Q-65. The entire study was repeated using visbroken residue n-C5 asphaltenes. For both Q-65 and n-C5 asphaltene post-adsorption oxidation, the Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose (KAS) kinetic method was used to estimate the kinetic triplets, namely f (α), Eα and Aα.