Preparation and Characterization of Polymeric UltraLow-Density Proppants: Epoxy/Phenolic Resin-Coated Polystyrene/Graphite Microspheres

By : Rui Ma, Xiaobing Han, Feng Bao, Jie Gao, Sanfeng Jiang, Xu Zhang, Kaiyue Chen, Chunjie Yan

Page No: 259-270

Abstract
Polymeric ultra-low-density (ULD) proppants were successfully synthesized through the coating of 20–40 mesh polystyrene/graphite microspheres by epoxy/phenolic. The coated microspheres had very low densities of 1.038–1.080 g/cm3 and were suspended in 5 wt% NaCl aqueous solution. Scanning electron micrographs showed that the coated microspheres had good sphericity (≥0.9) with a smooth coating layer of 12.7 μm. When a crosslinked epoxy/phenolic resin layer was introduced, the acid solubility, thermostability, and compression strength of the coated microspheres were dramatically improved. When the concentration of resin impregnating solution was reached 40%, the optimal performance of ULD proppants was achieved, and the following characteristics were obtained: (1) acid solubility as low as 0.06%; (2) 5% weight loss temperature as high as 378 °C; (3) percentage of damage as low as 1.2% at 68 MPa

Authors :
Rui Ma and Chunjie Yan : Engineering Research Center of Nano-Geomaterials of Ministry of Education, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China.
Xiaobing Han, Feng Bao, Jie Gao, Sanfeng Jiang, Xu Zhang and Kaiyue Chen : College of Chemistry, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China.