Synthesis Of Fatty Acid Salts And Their Performance As Oil Gelling Agent

Oil gelling agent is a new kind of oil spill treatment chemicals that can gel the oil fast into a solid or semi-solid lumps which could float on water. The created solid gel is convenient for mechanical salvage recovery and thus eliminate the impact of oil spill on the environment. In this paper, different kinds of fatty acid salts were synthesized and their performance as oil gelling agent were tested. The impact of chemical structures and operational conditions on gelling performances were also investigated. The improvement of the gelling performance by compound of fatty acid salt with other substances were testified. The results show that the lager the hydration of metal ion and the saturation of the carbon chain, the better the gelling performance. Gelling agent with only one hydroxy gives the best performance. Among all the fatty acid salts tested in this study, aluminum ethylhexanoate has the highest performances. The performance of this substances is not affected by pH and salinity and could not create secondary pollution and thus suitable for using as oil gelling agent. For this gelling agent, the higher the temperature, the faster the gelling rate. The oil capacity can be4g/g and22g/g when temperature is0℃and35℃, respectively. The results also show that the gelling performance can be improved by adding benzoic acid into the gelling agent. The optimal addition proportion of benzoic acid in the agent is5%. With this ratio, the gelling rate and the oil capacity is increased by20%and10%, respectively.