• carbon
• enhanced
• macrosurfactants
• nanotubes
• oil
• polymer
• recovery

The everincreasing worldwide request of energy is becoming one of the most concerning issue of our modern age. As renewable resource has already proved unable to single-handedly resolve this problem, investigating in new and more efficient way of recovering and producing non-renewable resources is of incumbent importance. Enhancing the recovery of fossil fuel from their sedimentary basins is one of the most promising way to achieve this purpose.
Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods has been investigated in the last fifty years and, as widely told by literature, using of chemicals has proved to be a good choice for this kind of applications. Specifically, polymeric water-soluble materials have draw a lot of attentions in the recent years. Macrosurfactans, i.e. polymers composed by block of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, possess the ability to change the rheological proprieties of water making it better at acting as a displacing fluid thus improving the amounts of oil recovered from each process.
Moreover, recent developments in polymerization methods, allows to precisely tune and control the characteristic and the structure of macromolecules which ultimately permit to better investigate the relationship between structure and property.
In this research project, we aimed to synthesize polymer composed by styrene, glycidyl methacrylate and hydrolysable tert-butyl methacrylate in different composition by means of Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP), to eventually obtain novel macrosurfactans materials. Characterization and kinetics studies allow to determine the best experimental conditions for the process investigated. Afterwards, functionalization of the glycidyl epoxide moiety has been done with two different amines; notably, pyrene derivative was tested to confer fluorescence features to the prepared polymers. Thus, it would be possible to utilize pyrene as a fluorescent probe to study the polymer’s aggregation in solution or, more interestingly, to evaluate his behaviour during a simulated laboratory EOR process. For this application, rheology of the hydrolysed polymer was tested to determine their promising use for EOR applications. At the same time, GMA functionalized by pyrene, allowed to investigate the dispersing behavior of the polymers towards nanostructured conductive fillers such as carbon nanotubes. Solution mixing was utilized for the preparation of the nanocomposites containing different amounts of the graphitic filler to eventually endow electrical condictivity. In this regard, dispersion of pyrene-based polymer and carbon nanotubes were finally tested as resistive sensors to volatile organic compound (VOC).