Oil & Gas Research
Open Access

Research Article

Synthesis of Carbon Nanotubes for Oil-water Interfacial Tension Reduction

Soleimani H^1*, Yahya N¹, Baig MK¹, Khodapanah L², Sabet M³, Burda M⁴, Oechsner A⁵ and Awang M⁶

¹Department of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 32610 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia

²Faculty of Environmental Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia

³Department of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong BE1410, Institute Teknologi Brunei (ITB), Darussalam, Brunei

⁴Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge 27 Charles Babbage Road, Cambridge CB3 0FS, USA

⁵School of Engineering, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus Queensland 4222, Australia

⁶Petroleum Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia

*Corresponding Author:

Soleimani H
Department of Fundamental and Applied Sciences
Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Bandar Seri Iskandar
32610 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia
Tel: +6053688000
E-mail: Hassan.soleimani@petronas.com.my

Received date: September 16, 2015; Accepted date: October 28, 2015; Published date: November 05, 2015

Citation: Soleimani H, Yahya N, Baig MK, Khodapanah L, Sabet M, et al. (2015) Synthesis of Carbon Nanotubes for Oil-water Interfacial Tension Reduction. Oil Gas Res 1:104. doi: 10.4172/2472-0518.1000104

Copyright: © 2015 Soleimani H, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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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