Volume 67

Synthesis and performance evaluation of high temperature drag reducing agent for deep shale gas Zijia Liu , Xinfang Ma

Abstract

Employing inverse emulsion polymerization with acrylamide (AM) as the principal monomer and acrylic acid (AA) as the functional comonomer, an AM-AA emulsion polymer was successfully synthesized under optimized reaction conditions, including polymerization temperature. The structure of the resulting copolymer was characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), confirming the incorporation of both AM and AA repeating units. The emulsion displayed an average particle size of 222.4 nm with a polydispersity index (PDI) of 0.075, indicating a uniform and narrow size distribution. The AM-AA copolymer exhibited favorable water solubility and thermal stability. It also demonstrated moderate resistance to temperature and shear: after exposure to 90℃ the viscosity retention rate of a 3000 mg/L AM-AA polymer solution reached 47.52%. Furthermore, The drag reduction rate of AM-AA polymer is relatively high when the shear rate is 12000s-1, reaching 64.8%.

Keywords inverse emulsion polymerization ï¼› AM-AA drag reduction agentï¼›high temperature resistanceï¼› drag reduction rate