Abstract
Low-cost ceramic proppants were successfully prepared from natural bauxite and solid waste coal gangue via CaCO3 additive. 40 wt% of bauxite in raw materials was replaced by coal gangue, which significantly reduced the manufacturing costs. The apparent density, bulk density, acid solubility and breakage ratio of the proppant sintered at different temperatures were systematically investigated. The phase composition and morphological structure were determined using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results show that the amount of liquid phase affected the solid phase reaction velocity by changing sintering mechanism. When the sintering temperature was 1350 °C, the optimum size of the mullite crystal particles and the optimum amount of the liquid phase were observed and the samples exhibited the best performance.
Highlights
Hydraulic fracturing is an important technique to enhance oil and gas production, especially in low permeability oil and gas wells
When the sintering temperature rose from 1350 °C to 1450 °C, the diffraction peaks of mullite decreased slightly
The performance of low-cost ceramic proppants with 5 wt% CaCO3 as an additive was explored at different sintering temperatures
Summary
Hydraulic fracturing is an important technique to enhance oil and gas production, especially in low permeability oil and gas wells. Ceramic proppants have a higher density and are more costly than quartz sands due to high proportion of bauxite in raw materials. Ma et al.[2] prepared ceramic proppants using 92 wt% bauxite and the samples sintered at 1400°C possessed the lowest breakage ratio of 2.2% under 52 MPa closed pressure. Zhao et al.[3] fabricated ceramic proppants with 93 wt% calcined bauxite, which exhibited better performance with a breakage ratio of 3.22% under 52 MPa closed pressure sintered at 1355 °C. To the best of our knowledge, no study has been reported adding more than 30 wt% coal gangue as raw material and using CaCO3 as an additive to prepare ceramic proppants. Low-cost, high-strength ceramic proppants were prepared from natural bauxite and solid waste coal gangue as main raw materials and CaCO3 as an additive. Experimental procedure were the obtaining weight of the samples before and after
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