Development of Oil-in-Water Microemulsions and Evaluation of Its Presence in the Treatment of Produced Water.

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) by chemical methods, such as injection of surfactants and polymers, increases the efficiency of extracting petroleum. However, after permeating the reservoir, these products remain in the produced water and hamper its treatment, including the efficiency reduction of the flocculants normally used for this purpose. In this work, oil-in-water (O/W) microemulsions were prepared according to ternary phase diagrams, with two oil phases, solbrax and kerosene, extracted from oil fractions, and two ethoxylated nonylphenol surfactants with 8 and 9.

Determination of oil-in-water using nanoemulsions as solvents and UV visible and total organic carbon detection methods.

The aim of this study was to investigate the application of oil in water (O/W) nanoemulsion as solvent in the extraction step for determination of oil content in oily water, measured using a UV visible spectrophotometer (UV-vis) and a total organic carbon (TOC) analyzer. The optical micrographs and distribution size curves showed that the use of a small amount of nanoemulsion was capable of transforming the oily water in a colloidal dispersion that can be read in the UV-vis and TOC-VCHS devices. The oil content results obtained showed great accuracy between the measurements, with very low average standard deviation (∼5%) for both UV-vis and TOC-VCHS.