SBIR Phase I: Paramagnetic Spin-Probes for Corrosion Inhibition

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)项目的广泛影响/商业潜力解决了一种机制，以优化涵盖石油和天然气行业及其他领域的项目的缓蚀效果。仅美国工业每年因腐蚀造成的损失估计就高达1700亿美元。石油和天然气行业在这些成本中占据了高于平均水平的份额，因为其复杂而苛刻的生产技术，以及如果零部件发生故障会对环境造成威胁。如今，石油和天然气行业的标准缓蚀机制是注入一种化学缓蚀剂，通常是表面活性剂，这种缓蚀剂可以覆盖在油田管材的内部，避免腐蚀。由于失败的高成本，过度注入表面活性剂数量导致过高的成本和浪费不需要的化学品送到炼油厂是非常常见的。不幸的是，以前没有一种好的方法来判断表面活性剂过多实际上是过多的。这就是这一创新带来的具体新方面。它提出了一种机制，通过利用表面活性剂在非常大的磁场和GHz射频激励下的量子化学性质来实时检测是否有足够的表面活性剂。这个SBIR第一阶段项目建议从一种特殊设计的试剂中提取化学光谱，该试剂可以添加到采出液的样本中，其中化学光谱将根据是否有足够的表面活性剂来引起腐蚀抑制而改变。更具体地说，它将测量试剂的一些量子化学性质，即其超精细结构，这种结构会在表面活性剂胶束的存在下发生变化。基本上，胶束在试剂内的自由电子周围形成了一种遏制屏障，从而改变了这些电子在磁体和射频激发的组合中共振的方式。该项目的第一阶段将解决这一方法中的多重挑战，包括试剂的选择和开发稳健的算法，以将超精细数据转换为临界胶束浓度的量化，其中该算法需要能够容忍油田流体中的典型杂质。第一阶段还将验证一种光谱方法，该方法可以将超精细数据发送到云中，在云中基于人工智能的算法可以将光谱信息减少到操作员可操作的信息。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project addresses a mechanism to optimize corrosion inhibition for projects covering the oil and gas industry and beyond. Corrosion costs US industries alone an estimated $170 billion a year. The oil and gas industry takes an above average share of these costs because of its complex and demanding production techniques, and the environmental threat should components fail. Today, the standard inhibition mechanism for the oil and gas industry is to inject a chemical inhibitor, typically a surfactant, that can coat the interior of the oilfield tubular and avoid corrosion. Because of the high cost of failure, it is extremely common to over-inject surfactant quantities resulting in excessive costs and the waste of unwanted chemicals sent to the refinery. Unfortunately, there has not previously been a good way to tell when too much surfactant was in fact too much. That is the specific new aspect brought by this innovation. It proposes a mechanism to detect in real-time that there is sufficient surfactant by taking advantage of quantum chemical properties of those surfactants when they are subject to very large magnetic fields and GHz radio-frequency excitation.This SBIR Phase I project proposes to extract a chemical spectrum from a specially designed reagent that can be added to a sample of produced fluid, where that chemical spectrum will change depending on whether there is sufficient surfactant to cause corrosion inhibition. More specifically it is going to measure some quantum chemical properties of the reagent called its hyperfine structure that will change in the presence of surfactant micelles. Essentially the micelles form a containment barrier around free radical electrons within that reagent and thereby change the way those electrons can resonate in the combination of the magnet and RF excitation. Phase 1 of the project will resolve multiple challenges in this approach, including the choice of reagent and the development of robust algorithms to convert hyperfine data into quantification of critical micelle concentration, where the algorithm needs to be able to tolerate typical impurities found in oilfield fluids. Phase 1 will also validate a spectroscopic approach that can result in the hyperfine data being sent to the cloud where AI-based algorithms can reduce the spectral information to actionable information for the operator.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.