The Role of Carbon Nanotubes in Improving Thermal Stability of Polymeric Fluids: Experimental and Modeling

At harsh conditions of high pressure high temperature (HPHT), polymers undergo thermal degradation leading to serious loss in fluid rheological and filtration properties. Nano particles are the most promising additives proposed to address this challenge. The stability of nanofluids is perused from various facets including rheological and filtration properties, shale stability, and zeta potential. The presence of nanoparticles could amazingly reduce the filtration at high temperatures even by 95%, and it also had a conspicuous effect on shale stability, thermal conductivity, and zeta potential. Experimental data were fit to rheological models to determine the best models describing the behavior of the nanosystem. It was clarified that the Sisko and Mizhari-Berk models enjoy the highest accuracy among the others. Moreover, a correlation is developed relating the viscosity of nanofluid to shear rate, temperature, and nanoparticles' concentration. The model exposed high accuracy regarding a high value of average correlation factor, which was 0.994.