Evaporation At present, a number of models have been developed for predicting evaporative losses of specific compounds and pseudo-compounds (distillate cuts by completed

weight) from crude oil based on a Raoult’s law approach and Henry’s law constants. Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely characterize each distillate cut with respect to its mole fraction in the oil because all of the distillate cut components are never fully identified (Payne et al., 1984). Therefore, assumptions concerning the composition of various distillate cut fractions have to be made. Nevertheless, reasonably good agreement has been obtained in predicted versus observed distillation curves for oil weathering in wave simulations (Payne et al., 1983a, 1984). Temperature effects are fairly well predicted, whereas the effects of sea state on evaporation are only empirically approached at best (Payne et al., 1984).