No abstract

Polyacrylamide based hydrogels are widely used in enhanced oil recovery applications where huge amounts of polymer is injected in the tertiary stage after flooding with water and steam. Synthesis of these polymers heavily depends on the mixing efficiency of the agitators in addition to the reactor design itself. The high viscosity of the medium even at a very low polymer loading makes it inevitable to operate the reactors/reaction systems using diluted polymer solution. To overcome this problem, we proposed to use a static mixer with open blade structure such as Sulzer SMX for continuous production of these water soluble polymers. Further, to achieve enhanced mixing efficiency, the internal structure of this static mixer is modified by introducing perforations and serrations on and along the blades of the internal element. Three different type of serrations such as triangular, square and semi-circular geometries were investigated. The semi-circular serration showed better performance over others and is used for conducting the free radical polymerization of acrylamide. The geometry of the internal structure is designed using AutoCAD which is imported to COMSOL environment where the reaction domain is meshed and solved using finite element method. It was observed that enhanced mixing and conversion of acrylamide were achieved. The success of using the proposed modified static mixer can also be extended and easily used for synthesis of hydrolyzed, partially hydrolyzed and copolymers of acrylamide.