Could petroleum work as lubricant oil on slippery lubricated surfaces to prevent inorganic scaling?

The use of nucleation and growth inhibitors at offshore oil industry to avoid inorganic scaling could be replaced by both physical and chemical modifications at surfaces to prevent the scaling. In that way, the slippery lubricated surfaces have been showing promising results as scaling preventers, notably when the lubricants are perfluorinated oils, which are immiscible with almost every kind of compound. Nonetheless, the requirement of periodically refilling these lubricant oils is disadvantageous, especially when dealing with deep sea facilities. Using petroleum as the lubricant oil could skip the refilling step, since it is always present in the extraction medium. So, this work tests the effectiveness of petroleum as the lubricant oil in functionalized textured polyaniline applied as anti-scaling material in conditions that simulate the medium of offshore operation. As result, petroleum as lubricant oil presents effective anti-scaling capacity and works perfectly in slippery lubricated surfaces.

Interfacial Phenomena on the Inorganic Scaling Prevention.

Superhydrophobic and lubricated slippery surfaces were tested under high salinity inorganic scaling medium and had their antifouling capacity assessed by optical and electron microscopy. The superhydrophobic surfaces were build up with hierarchically rough electropolymerized polyaniline onto stainless steel substrates and functionalized with low-polarizability thiols. Subsequently, these materials were lubricated with perfluorinated oil to obtain slippery surfaces. Regardless of the large amount of inorganic scale found onto superhydrophobic surfaces after the scaling test, the slippery ones showed to be very efficient as fouling preventers. From crystal quartz microbalance experiments, the wetting regime of the superhydrophobic surfaces was evaluated and shows that the Cassie-Baxter effect was not lost during the entire scaling test. The interfaces energies of the systems were assessed with contact angle experiments and showed that the scaling increases because the interfacial free energy is minimized. These results lead to a better understanding of how superhydrophobic surfaces could induce inorganic scaling instead of preventing it.