Environmental Protection Performance of Anti-Collapse Agents with Different Hydrophobic Chain Lengths

With the growing requirements on environmental protection in drilling fluid additives, the traditional anti-collapsing agents are unable to meet the demand. Therefore, improving the environmental protection performance of anti-collapse agents has drawn great attention from scientists. Organic amines are commonly used as anti-collapse agents due to their good anti-collapse properties. In this paper, alkali diamines have been selected as research objects to evaluated the anti-collapse abilities by immersion tests and linear expansion experiments. The experimental results showed that alkyl diamines demonstrate good anti-collapse abilities. However, with increase in the number of C atoms, the solubility of alkyl diamines decreases, and the inhibition by the potassium dichromate method, dilution and inoculation method, and luminescent bacteria method. The result show that the biodegradability of the alkyl diamine anti-collapse agents increase gradually increase in the number of carbon atoms in the chain, while the solubility and biotoxicity decrease. Therefore, the longer the alkyl diamine carbon chain length, the better the environmental performance of anti-collapse agents. Hence, this research provides a guideline for synthesizing new organic amine anti-collapse agents.