Novel drag reducing agents for turbulent drag reduction in Taylor Couette flow

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The main goal of this project is to develop novel responsive polymers for drag reduction in turbulent flow. These polymers would be beneficial to Kemira to employ as a drag reducing agent (DRA) in the fracking fluid for enhanced oil recovery. Due to depletion of conventional oil resources, unconventional resources such as shale reservoirs and oil sands are attracting a lot of attention. These require enhanced oil recovery techniques such as hydraulic fracturing in which fluid containing proppants, sand and DRA is pumped into wells to extract the oil/gas. The conventional drag reducing agents are high molecular weight polymers such as polyacrylamide which sometimes get adsorbed on reservoir surface, thereby affecting the gas/oil production. Significant energy is required to remove the adsorbed polymers and hence, responsive polymers which can shrink with an external trigger such as temperature are potential solution for this problem. Poly-N-isopropylacrylamide (PNIPAM), a thermo-responsive polymer shrinks or become hydrophobic at 32oC and is convenient to synthesize at high molecular weight. A free radical polymerization technique will be used to synthesize this polymer and drag reduction will be tested in a Taylor Couette flow setup.