With the growing range of offshore oil and gas exploration, onshore and shallow water oil and gas resources are depleting, deep-sea oil and gas development has become a hot and frontier oil industry. Subsea pipeline will withstand a certain depth of the static pressure in the marine environment in cold water, gas for crude oil transported. For some of the higher crude oil consistency in the pipeline process, unless special measures are taken, when the oil temperature is reduced to a certain value, will continue to wash out the wax component of high molecular weight and low molecular weight, viscosity of crude oil increases, liquidity variation, or in long-distance transport of natural gas under the conditions of high pressure, making the gas hydrate ice-like solid state form loose precipitation can cause serious pipeline blockage, resulting in the production accidents. Therefore, the need for effective subsea pipeline insulation treatment to ensure the normal operation of the pipeline.
In order to achieve the insulation effect, start looking for new material, but this time, hollow glass beads entered everyone's attention. Hollow glass beads is a new filler material, it has a high compressive strength, low density, and high melting point. Epoxy resin filled with hollow glass beads, prepared by low density, high strength and low water absorption of the composite material, the density of the prepared material was 0.71g / cm3, a compression strength of 64.5MPa, at room temperature, water absorption of less than 2.1%. Silane coupling agent KH-550 hollow glass microspheres surface modification, and the activity of glass beads was subjected to tests to characterize. It was found that the glass beads after the surface-modified into hydrophilic lipophilic, so as to better filled epoxy resin. With the increase of the content of the glass beads, the composite material is also reduced compressive strength and hardness, the glass beads mass fraction of 20%, the compressive strength and hardness rapid decline. Glass beads modified silane coupling agent added to the epoxy resin, the compressive strength of some improvement. Water absorption of the composite material with increasing content of glass beads followed increases, after a silane coupling agent, the water absorption of the composite material is greatly reduced.
The emergence of high-performance glass beads can improve the floating material is light, resistant to seawater corrosion, dimensional stability, high strength, insulation properties. And filling the deep pipeline is full play to the low thermal conductivity of high-performance glass beads, features low density, high strength.