Avaliação dos efeitos de exposição ao CO2 de fita compósita para isolamento térmico utilizada em dutos flexíveis

Abstract

In the face of the challenges that the oil industry has encountered to make oil exploration possible in the pre-salt fields, it is increasingly necessary to re-evaluate or even search for new materials that are used in submarine equipment, that depending on the application, are subjected to the most severe conditions of temperature and pressure, greater depths and exposure to different components that can abruptly accelerate their degradation. Flexible pipe’s thermal insulation layer consists of syntactic foam that has wide use in marine, aerospace, aeronautics and petroleum industries. The increased severity of the conditions of flexible pipes, like high concentrations of carbon dioxide inside the equipment and increase of temperature and pressure of oil production, turns the CO2 from the internal fluids a powerful solvent that in most cases has the capacity to cause physical and chemical changes in the polymers and thus requires material’s evaluation. Through the evaluation of the physical, thermal and mechanical properties it was possible to quantify the degradation of the flexible pipe insulation specimens after 10 decompression cycles of samples exposed to CO2 and synthetic sea water. The results show that, although the packaging causes changes in the properties of the material, it is still suitable for use. Most of the changes in the material’s thermal properties are related to increasing in the crystallinity level caused by CO2 exposure, as demonstrated by DSC results.