Experimental Study of the Effect of Gum Arabic Surfactant on Nano-Composite of Gamma-Alumina and Silica in Low Salinity Water Flooding for Enhanced Oil Recovery

The method of low salinity water with nanoparticles can be considered as a hybrid method of enhanced oil recovery. The goal of this paper is to investigate the effect of salinity on nanoparticles with a green surfactant in enhanced oil recovery. It was tried to determine the appropriate mass fraction of the nanohybrid and the optimal concentration of salinity for nanofluids in the micromodel flooding test. In this research, gamma-alumina and silica metal oxide nanoparticles were used in basic fluids with different salinities. Nanoparticles improve oil recovery factor, however the most important challenge of using nanoparticles is when they are placed next to divalent ions in brine, which become very unstable. Therefore, an attempt was made to study the stability of gamma-alumina, silica and their hybrid nanoparticles (in different mass fractions) with different salinity. To increase the duration of stability of nanoparticles in water with different salinity, environmentally compatible and green surfactant called Gum Arabic was used. The experiments were designed with software and Taguchi method. After the preparation of nanofluids, their stability was investigated and the flooding test was performed on the nanofluids that had good stability. The lowest stability period was related to nanofluids whose base fluid was reported to have a salinity of 40,710 ppm. The highest recovery factor of gamma-alumina nanohybrids with a mass fraction of 10:90 in water with a salinity of 20400 ppm, with 1000 ppm of Arabic gum equal to 60.34% and the lowest recovery factor among nanofluids for silica nanoparticles with deionized water without gum Arabic was reported to be 34.5%.