The effect of silica nanoparticles (SNP) on surface tension of commercial surfactant

Abstract

Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is one of promising method to increase the national oil production in Indonesia. Chemical EOR by adding surfactant to reservoir may decrease the interfacial tension (IFT) values, alter the wettability of rock and hence may increase the production. In this work, the influence of Silica Nano Particle (SNP) addition to the IFT of commercial EOR surfactant has been investigated. We found that without addition of surfactant, the liquid sample with only containing SNP gave high IFT value at ca. 10-1 dyne/cm. Addition of surfactant has decreased the IFT and variation of surfactant concentration gave the value of CMC value after dilution of 10x. The effect of adding silica nanoparticles (SNPs) to commercial surfactants showed that addition of SNP may decrease the IFT value from 3.10-3 dyne/cm to 5.10-4 dyne/cm. The photograph from IFT measurement also indicated that SNP gave more stable mixture during IFT measurement. By varying the volume of SNP added to the system, it was found that finding optimum volume is important as excessive addition of SNP may result in higher IFT values. This study may provide a further pathway to investigate the influence of SNP addition to large scale EOR Project in Indonesia.