Development of a Method to Evaluate the Performance of Aqueous Polymer Solutions as Drag Reduction Agents in Bench Scale

This work describes a method to evaluate, in reduced scale, the performance of polymer samples as drag reduction agents in aqueous solutions. To measure the pressure drop in a turbulent regime, a specially adapted capillary viscosimeter was used, with reduced dimensions adapted to produce the desired regime and adequate pressure measurement points. To verify the technique's reliability, samples of polyacrylamide were synthesized with different molar masses, by varying the quantity of the polymerization initiator. The molar masses obtained were determined by size exclusion chromatography (SEC). The efficiency of the polymer as a drag reducer, as expected, increased as the molar mass increased, which validates the use of this method to study the drag reduction properties of polymer materials in aqueous solutions.