DETAILING THE OIL-WATER EMULSION SEPARATION PROCESS

Formation of water-oil emulsion in wells and pipelines of oil fields can suspend oil producing enterprise operation in 24 hours. Several decades ago this problem was solved by dosing artificially created surfactants –demulsifiers – into well production. The article considers the processes of merging of water globules and their release into free water in samples of water-oil emulsion in vitro. For 24 hours, water sedimentation in the background sample of the emulsion without a reagent and in the sample with an oil-soluble demulsifier was observed. Using a microscope the distribution of water globules with respect to their size was studied, a scheme for estimating the size of demulsifier molecules based on their adsorption on the surface of water globules in a single layer was proposed. As a result of the calculations, it was determined that a large number of demulsifier molecules, comparable to three hundred million, can be located on the surface of a water globule.