Soheil Mellat - M.Sc. Student, Sharif University of Technology
Milad Razghandi - M.Sc. Student, Sharif University of Technology

Polymer flooding is one the most common tertiary recovery methods which consists long chain polymer molecules with the injected water in order to increase the water viscosity and improve the sweep efficiency of waterflooding. However, one of the biggest challenges of implementation of polymer in the EOR process is adsorption of polymer in porous media. According to the fast growing application of nanotechnology, the effectiveness of nanoparticles on the reduction of polymer adsorption is yet to be investigated. Therefore, the effect of adding different types of nanoparticles on polymer adsorption-reduction was experimentally studied. In the present study, many efforts have been made to observe the effects of adding nanoparticles on adsorption-reduction of polymer in Partially Hydrolyzed Polyacrylamide solution. To measure the adsorption density, the electrical conductivity was used to conduct the adsorption behavior of the polymer and two types of nanoparticles in the aqueous phase. The calibration curve was determined to calculate the polymer concentration and based on the experimental results, the calibration curve was generated for carbonate rock samples and the amount of polymer adsorption after adding nanoparticles was determined. The Critical Micelle Concentration (CMC) for each type of solutions were obtained. It was observed that the addition of nanoparticles into the polymeric solutions remarkably reduce the polymer concentration loss. The adsorption density decreases by 16% in the presence of nanosilica and 24% in presence of nanoalumina.

Polymer Flooding, CMC, Adsorption, Nanoparticles, Electrical Conductivity