Investigation of Water-Oil Emulsion Stabilization and Breaku

A state-of-the-art portable dispersion characterization rig (P-DCR) is used to generate emulsions with Exxsol mineral oil, commercial distilled water, as well as hydrophilic and hydrophobic silica nanoparticles (NP) as emulsifiers. The emulsion is prepared in the P-DCR batch separator vessel, whereby the separation kinetics are observed and recorded. Three data sets are acquired, as follows: 1) Emulsion stabilization utilizing nanoparticles (Data Set I); 2) Emulsion breakup by oil extraction and water injection (Data Set II); and 3) Emulsion breakup using demulsifiers (Data Set III).;Data Set I (emulsion stability utilizing NP) reveals a strong dependency on the wettability of the NP used as emulsifiers, NP concentration and water-cut (WC). Increased weight of NP in the system for any wettability produces more stable emulsions.;A base case emulsion is used for acquiring Data Set II (emulsion breakup by oil extraction and water injection), which is formed at 25% WC and 0.01% w/w hydrophilic NP. This data set is divided into 3 subsets, including oil extraction only, oil-extraction/pure-water injection, as well as oil-extraction/water with hydrophilic NP injection. For oil extraction only (Subset 1), and for a sufficient volume extraction, phase inversion occurs that results in a complete separation of the oil and water.;The acquired data for oil-extraction/pure-water-injection (Subset 2) results in a faster breakup of the emulation, as compared to oil extraction only, reaching phase inversion point earlier. Repetitive oil-extraction/pure-water-injection cycles enables determining the combined effects of the WC and NP on the separation process. The final lowest WC and NP concentration are around 37% and 0.006% w/w respectively for emulsion inversion to occur.;Subset 3 (oil-extraction/water with hydrophilic NP injection) results reveal that dispersing hydrophilic NP in water does not promote improvement of the emulsion breakup. The separation process, however, does not differ significantly even for high hydrophilic NP concentrations, emphasizing the dominant role of the hydrophobic particles (dispersed in the base case emulsion).;The emulsion (base case) breakup using demulsifiers data (Data Set III) are acquired utilizing 3 commercial demulsifiers, namely, ALKEN 860, ALKEN 862 and DB 964, with concentrations of 100, 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 ppm. In general, an increase of the demulsifier concentration leads to an improvement of the emulsion separation.