Loading...

Preparation of Thermosensitive Polymer Nanoparticles to Apply in Smart Enhanced Oil Recovery Process

Tamsilian, Yousef | 2016

721 Viewed
  1. Type of Document: Ph.D. Dissertation
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 49077 (48)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
  6. Advisor(s): Ramazani Saadatabadi, Ahmad; Ayatollahi, Shahabeddin; Masihi, Mohsen
  7. Abstract:
  8. With the decline in oil discoveries during the last decades, it is believed that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies will play a key role to meet the energy demand in coming years. Polymer flooding has been commonly used worldwide as one of the EOR processes. Literature reviews show that the active water-soluble polymers have a number of limitations related to their surface absorption, undesirable plugging, polymer concentration limitation,expensive, and low thermal, mechanical, bacterial, and salt tolerance. Up to now, five different polymer categories (i.e. polyacrylamide, hydrolyzed polyacrylamide, acrylamidebased resistant copolymers, associative copolymers, and thermoassociative copolymers) have been synthesized and studied for polymer enhanced oil recovery process. In this work,we study preparation and performance of thermosensitive copolymer as smart core-shell nanostructure consisting of polyacrylamide-polystyrene (PPN) and compare with polyacrylamide as conventional viscosifier and also thermoassociative copolymer (TAP) and commercial product (Superpusher SAV10) as latest updated and effective synthesized polymer categories through enhanced oil recovery process. For that aim, the relationships between inverse miniemulsion polymerization conditions and polyacrylamide properties were developed to determine the optimal polymer properties for rheological modifier application. Then, PPN was synthesized by the one-pot, two-step inverse emulsion polymerization technique, where the polystyrene shell was grafted onto by surface polymerization. Meanwhile, acrylamide-based thermoassociative macromonomer synthesized by solution technique was copolymerized with acrylamide via inverse miniemulsion method to prepare TAP. Time-dependent release behavior of PPNs promotes
    the effectiveness of PPN as viscosity modifiers, the maximum viscosity enhancement is achieved at longer residence times in the reservoirs. This can be up to 30 days, when released polymer still kept the activity. In conditions of high salinity (total dissolved solids of 178,082 mg/L), temperatures up to 90 °C and shear rates up to 1000 s-1, PPNs have shown superior properties, such as elastic modulus, shear rate behavior, viscosity lost, and sand adsorption over that of polyacrylamide. Comparison of PPN with TAP and Superpusher SAV10 shows that the preparation procedure, mechanism of molecular weight increase, and degradation possibility for the thermosensitive copolymer is so simple and less than that of the mentioned copolymers during the EOR process because of the grafted protective nanolayer. All of this makes the synthesized thermosensitive copolymer promising candidates for the polymerenhanced oil recovery process
  9. Keywords:
  10. Enhanced Oil Recovery ; Controlled Release ; Core-Shell Nanostructure ; Copolymers ; Time-Dependent Systems ; Viscosity ; Temperature Sensitivity ; Thermoassociative Chains

 Digital Object List

 Bookmark

No TOC