Ravi Shankar Kumar
The increased demand of hydrocarbon enforces reduction in oil reserves globally which became one of the major challenge for the world. Thusly, improving oil production from current reservoirs holds the key to meet the current and near future challenges of global energy demands. The development of new technologies such as nanotechnologies showed potential benefits to address energy challenges for several industrial applications including oilfield. Silica Nanofluid, a colloidal solution of solid charged silica (SiO2) nanoparticles (NPs) suspended in a base fluid (oil/water/glycol/polymeric solutions); possibly beneficial to improve the oil production by governing the matter of facts at nano scale level [1]. Moreover, stability of the formulated nanofluids can be characterized using macroscopic study, dynamic light scattering (DLS) study, ultraviolet–visible (UV-vis) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with elemental analysis and mapping techniques followed by rheological study; which is potentially beneficial for oil recovery [2]. Before, oil recovery experiments, the reservoir properties such as wettability alteration and IFT reduction need to be investigated which holds remarkable effect on oil recovery. Therefore, a combination of NPs is proposed in this study and the obtained results showed that the surface coated NPs by surfactant and super molecular structure of SiO2
