Synthesis of Carbon Nanotubes for Oil-water Interfacial Tension Reduction

A conventional recovery method has an adverse effect towards unconventional reservoir production. A nanoparticle leads as a primary candidate to develop the unconventional reservoir and it is considered as one of the latest technology in oil and gas industry. Therefore this research is intended to study the effects of Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) towards interfacial tension. Practically MWCNTs were successfully synthesized using CVD technique by pyrolizing toluene and ferrocene in inert gas environment and characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) in order to understand its structure, shape, size and morphology. The characterization results show the CNTs are in cylindrical shape and well aligned. After characterization, a pendant drop experiment was carried out to further understand the effect of Carbon Nanotubes on Interfacial Tension (IFT). Since the Carbon Nanotubes are very “cloudy” the drop phase could not be identified and the Interfacial Tension was not calculated by the software. Due to this major setback, the Surface Tension was calculated with different concentration.

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