Investigating synergistic effects of surfactants and nanoparticles (NPs) on emulsion viscosity
List of Authors
  • Mohd Zaidi Jaafar , Rafat Abdul-Razzaq

Keyword
  • Chemical enhanced oil recovery; Emulsion stability; Synergistic effect; Surfactants; Silica nanoparticles.

Abstract
  • Most oil producing fields have been exploited using primary (natural) recovery or secondary (waterflooding) which makes oil production a challenge with time. Chemical enhanced oil recovery is considered one of the methods to increase oil production via applying chemicals such as surfactants. Nevertheless, the usage of this method is hindered due to the cost of the materials involved in the process and that they might be environmentally unfriendly due to the usage of excess additives. One of the ways proposed has been to use emulsion flooding to increase oil production. These emulsions should be stable enough with high viscosity to give higher recovery. To achieve increased emulsion viscosity leading to stabilization and higher oil recovery, one of the suggested methods is application of synergistic effect between nanoparticles (NPs) and surfactants. This study focuses on measuring the viscosity of emulsions when employing the synergistic effects between surfactants and NPs with varying types of surfactants, and concentrations of the nanoparticles. Two types of surfactants have been studied, which are an anionic surfactant -sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) and a cationic surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB). Nanoparticles that were utilized in the study are nano-silica. It was found that with varying concentration of nanoparticles, the viscosity showed peak values at 0.5xSDS concentration (60 cP) and 1.75xCTAB concentration (107 cP) compared to 24 cP and 9 cP without the usage of NPs for SDS and CTAB, respectively. This has shown that synergistic effect is beneficial in increasing the emulsion viscosity, which can be implemented in the application of blocking pores with higher permeability, known as permeability profile modification as well as to enhance emulsion stability.

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