Characterization of Nanosilica and Comparing Its Effect on Crude Oils and Diesel Fuel

Abstract

Heavy oils generally exhibit high viscosity, which is detrimental to their production, transport, and refining. The Oil & Gas industry has thoroughly investigated the use of chemical agents to improve the mobility of this type of low-quality crude oils at the surface as well as reservoir conditions for many years. In this sense the main objective of this work is to investigate the viscosity reduction of heavy oil resulting from the presence of silica nanoparticles by asphaltene adsorption process. Silica nanoparticles was produced successfully in this work from sand of Mount Sannam in Basra city (south of Iraq) by chemical and physical methods (SiO_2ch and SiO_2ph respectively). The XRD results indicated a high purity SiO_2ch NPs was produced with purity of 96.8%, while, the purity of SiO_2ph NPs was about 87.2%. The main particle size analyzer (PSA) were measured to be 35 nm and 22 nm for SiO_2ch and SiO_2ph respectively. On the other hand, the BET total surface area of SiO_2ch and SiO_2ph NPs were 520 m²/g and 705 m²/g respectively. Also, the SEM results showed a uniform distribution of nanoparticles for both prepared silica nanoparticles. The FTIR results indicated a high intensity bonds were formed due to present of functional groups of Si-O-Si, O-Si-O and Si-O. Two Iraqi crude oil samples was selected to be as base fluid with APIs (17.4 and 29.1). Also, diesel fuel with API= 40.91 was tested. For each hydrocarbon a nanofluid was prepared by adding silica nanoparticles to parent fluid. Four concentration of silica nanoparticles were added to the parent fluid (250, 500, 1000 and 1250 mg/L). And also, used a bath ultrasonic method for dispersing NPs inside the parent oils.

Keywords: Petroleum Pipelines; natural nanoparticles; viscosity reduction; silica preparation; silica characterization; asphaltene adsorption; crude oil

DOI: 10.7176/JNSR/9-4-08