Use of Tritium to Study the Solubility of Water in Hydrocarbons

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.