Application of chemical exergy calculation methods to petroleum derived light products

These days the quality of energy and the its usage efficiently is one of the most important research subjects. Due to the decreasing of the fossil energy sources, studies are continued to increase the efficiency of these sources. The efficiency of the processes applied to use the fuels obtained from fossil energy sources is getting more important due to decrease of these sources.Calculation of efficiency of processes is based on first and second laws of thermodynamics and these thermodynamic laws are used for exergy analysis. The aim of these studies is to make more efficiently of the energy systems. The chemical exergy analysis of chemical change processes like the processes where combustion reactions or concentration change reactions take place, have high importance. The maximum useful work obtainable from a chemical change process can be calculated by a chemical exergy analysis. To do this type of analysis, the chemical exergy values of all related chemical substances are needed. Therefore, the knowledge of the chemical exergy values of petroleum derived fractions have an important value.In this work, the chemical exergy calculation methods and also the methods that can be applied to petroleum and petroleum derived fuels were given. The importance of the thermodynamic data in the calculation of chemical exergies and the limitations in applications encountered at the absence of this kind of data were also determined in this work. Chemical exergy values were calculated for petroleum derived fuels for which thermodynamic data were available, by using methods given here before. Furthermore, the values of chemical exergy were calculated and tabulated for the components of petroleum derived fuels.Keywords: Chemical exergy, chemical exergy calculations, petroleum, petroleum derived fuels, chemical exergy calculations of petroleum derived fuels.