Proppants sintering

J. J. Fitzgibbon. Use of uncalcined/partially calcined ingredients in the manufacture of sintered pellets useful for gas and oil well proppants. Patent US 4623630, 1986. 

J. J. Fitzgibbon. Sintered, spherical, composite pellets prepared from clay as a major ingredient useful for oil and gas well proppants. Patent CA 1232751, 1988. 

A. Khaund. Sintered low density gas and oil well proppants from a low cost unblended clay material of selected composition. Patent US 4668645,1987. 

Proppants are solid particles used to hold open the fracture after conclusion of the well treatment. Criteria to choose the economically most effective proppant for a given set of formation conditions have been discussed (7 6). While sand is the most commonly used proppant because of its low cost, resin-coated sand, sintered bauxite, and A O particles have also been used because of their greater compressive strength and resistance to dissolution at high temperature and pH (55). While epoxy resins are most commonly used, the use of other resins such as phenol-formaldehyde has been described. 

The materials commonly used as proppants can be grouped into three main categories, listed in Table 10.25. The first proppant material used was rounded silica sand mined from glacial deposits. This material was initially selected owing to both its wide availability near production wells and its low cost, but since the early days several other industrial materials have been selected and used as proppants, and today we observe the increased use of synthetic materials, especially sintered and fused ceramics. The main impetus in focusing on ceramics was driven by the fact that ceramic materials offer suitable properties for use in modern deep wells today. 

All ceramic proppant producers use as feedstock essentially bauxite and, to a lesser extent, other industrial minerals with a high alumina content such as kaolin, nepheline syenite, wollastonite, talc, and feldspars. The final spherical shape is obtained by several processing routes currently used in the ceramics industry for producing beads and other particulate materials. The most common of these processes are pelletizing and sintering, atomization, fire polishing, and flame spraying. 

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