Yana Chaikina, master’s student at Tomsk Polytechnic University, has developed a magnetic unit to improve the efficiency of separation of stable and abnormally stable water-in-oil emulsions. A prototype of the unit has already been created. The unit can reduce operating costs of field oil production. Experiments have shown that the unit can separate emulsions by 43% more efficiently in terms of quality and separation time. Yana Chaikina was shortlisted as a finalist of the VII All-Russian Competition of Research Projects. The competition final will be held at the All-Russian Youth Scientific Forum “Science of the Future — Science of the Youth” in Novosibirsk in late August.
Yana Chaikina is a master's student at the TPU School of Earth Sciences & Engineering, majoring in chemical engineering. She got into oil magnetic treatment in her fourth year of undergraduate study and chose it as the subject of her graduation thesis, supervised by Evgenia Beshagina, associate professor at the Division for Chemical Engineering.
More than half of Russian crude oil reserves are hard-to-recover. One of the most common ways to increase oil recovery and maintain formation pressure is reservoir flooding, or water injection. This results in the formation of water-in-oil emulsions resistant to separation, which complicates the process of production, gathering, and further transportation of oil. The pour point rises, oil viscosity increases, and corrosion of equipment intensifies. Therefore, there is a need for technology that would accelerate the emulsion separation process.
The unit designed by Yana Chaikina functions as follows: water droplets are polarized in a magnetic field. Small droplets of water attract one another and merge into larger drops, which are called agglomerates. Under gravity, they settle, thus the sedimentation process takes place. This is how water is separated from oil.
The efficiency of water-in-oil emulsion separation was studied using a laboratory magnetic unit (minimum viable product). It consists of high-energy permanent magnets with rare-earth metals. It was compared to an alternative that separates water-oil emulsion by gravitational sedimentation. The parameters of Yana’s development turned out to be 43% more efficient, both in terms of time and separation quality.
Industrial partners were also involved in the project implementation. One of them has made a pilot magnetic installation based on the drawings. Another one is preparing it for pilot testing at the Severo-Komsomolsk field.
The unit is intended to be used as an add-on to other equipment in order to improve field performance. It helps to reduce demulsifier consumption and accelerates the emulsion separation process. The technology is also environmentally friendly, cheaper than conventional separation methods, and does not require power supply.