Energy industry is a wide term that includes all the industries involved in the production, manufacturing, sales and distribution of energy. It includes petroleum and gas industries, coal industry, nuclear power industry and the renewable power industries. Researchers in the energy industry are developing more efficient and environmentally safe ways to produce energy. The petroleum industry looks for efficient ways of extracting and removing raw material from earth. This requires knowledge on different interfacial interactions between the drilling pipes and crude oil. Attension tensiometers provide high precision tools for the demanding needs of different applications of energy industries.
Application examples include:
• Thin film solar cells consist of a photovoltaic coating deposited onto a substrate. Contact angle measurements with optical tensiometer can be used to determine the quality of the coatings.
• Adhesion influences oil recovery in all operations. Therefore studies of adhesion of crude oil to the reservoir rock surface are important. Such adhesion studies can be performed by measuring contact angle using an optical tensiometer.
• Biofouling is an unwanted phenomenon causing contamination in pipelines and heat exchangers which use seawater as a coolant. These kinds of pipelines are commonly used especially next to nuclear power plants. Surface free energy analyzes with optical tensiometer can be used to study the properties of different coatings used to prevent the adhesion of microbial and mineral contaminants to pipelines.
• Surface and interfacial phenomena have a significant role in all stages of petroleum industry. Force and optical tensiometers can be used for example in exploring surface tension of different crude oil compositions to understand oil flow through capillary channels.