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

本项目的主要目标是开发用于湍流减阻的新型响应性聚合物。 这些聚合物将有益于Kemira用作压裂液中的减阻剂（KEM） 用于提高石油采收率。由于常规石油资源枯竭， 页岩储层和油砂正吸引很多注意力。这些都需要强化采油技术 其中将含有支撑剂、砂和水的流体泵入威尔斯井中 石油/天然气。常规的减阻剂是高分子量聚合物，例如聚丙烯酰胺 有时会吸附在储层表面上，从而影响气/油生产。显著的能量 需要去除吸附的聚合物，并因此去除可随外部环境收缩的响应性聚合物。 诸如温度之类触发器是该问题的潜在解决方案。聚-N-异丙基丙烯酰胺（PNIPAM），a 温度响应性聚合物在32 ℃时收缩或变成疏水性，便于在高温下合成， 分子量的自由基聚合技术将用于合成这种聚合物和药物 将在Taylor Couette流动装置中测试减少。

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.