Improving the Thermal Stability of Hydrophobic Associative Polymer Aqueous Solution Using a "Triple-Protection" Strategy

Because of their high viscoelasticity, Hydrophobic Associative Water-Soluble Polymers (HAWSPs) have been widely used in many industrial fields, especially in oilfield flooding and fracturing. However, one major problem which limits the wide applications of HAWSPs is their weak resistance to high temperatures. Once the temperature increases over 100 °C, the viscosity of the fracturing fluid decreases rapidly, because high temperatures reduce fluid viscosity by oxidizing the polyacrylamide chains and weakening the association of hydrophobic groups. To improve the high temperature resistance of one HAWSP, a triple-protection strategy was developed. First, rigid N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone moiety was introduced into the polymer chains. Second, an environmentally-friendly deoxidizer, carbohydrazide, was selected to prevent polymer oxidization by scavenging dissolved oxygen. Results showed that both the rigid groups and the deoxidizer improved the temperature resistance of the polymer and helped it maintain high viscosity under high temperature and shear rate. Using these two protection strategies, the resistant temperature of the polymer could reach 160 °C. However, the polymer network still got severely damaged at further elevated temperatures. Therefore, as the third protection strategy, the pre-added high temperature responsive crosslinking agent was applied to form new networks at elevated temperatures. The results have shown that the optimized polymer solution as a kind of fracturing fluid showed good temperature resistance up to 200 °C.