PFI-TT: Technology Transfer: Robust Hierarchically-Textured Surfaces for Transportation of Heavy Crude Oils

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is in designing robust surface coatings for the interiors of rail cars and oil tankers that transport heavy crude oil and bitumen. Fossil fuels continue to play a pivotal role in meeting increasing global energy needs; They serve as a feedstock for the chemical and asphalt industries.

Heavy crude oil and bitumen are highly viscous, which leads to difficulties in extraction, midstream transportation, and processing operations. For instance, heavy crude oil and bitumen must be shipped using heated tankers, railcars, trucks, and pipelines, which requires enormous energy expenditures. Shipping also requires high-cost dilution to obtain flow properties that are conducive to transportation.

Furthermore, cleaning these vessels incurs considerable cost, results in substantial unrecovered residues, and engenders safety hazards. The proposed coating formulations will merge novel surface chemistries with 3D texturation to improve the flow of heavy crude oil. These coatings will decrease waste during transportation, reduce heating costs, decrease diluent use, and reduce downtime.

Designing and manufacturing coating technologies for viscous oil transportation in the United States will ensure that the US maintains leadership in an area critical to energy security and economic growth.

This project may result in engineered coatings with surface chemistries and 3D textured structures that promote oil repellency, adhesion strength, corrosion resistance, and robustness to thermal cycling. While extensive efforts have focused on designing engineered surfaces that repel water, options for surfaces that repel heavy crude oils are exceedingly sparse.

The proposed innovation is unique in its ability to repel unheated viscous crude oil and distinctive in its performance at high temperature, applicability at scale (entire shipping containers and railcars), and compatibility with chemistries that inhibit corrosion of the underlying metals. This project will advance this innovation in terms of technology development by (1) efficiently navigating the materials design space to optimize texturation and surface chemistries; (2) providing fundamental understanding of design principles that lead to oil repellency and adhesion strength through chemical and mechanical characterization; (3) developing models for lifetime predictions by studying mechanical failure mechanisms; and (4) fabricating and field testing a bitutainer scale model prototype.

A distinctive element of the proposed project is its emphasis on interrogation of physical mechanisms and chemical design principles (not just optimization of compositions), which may bring disruptive innovation to the transportation and storage of heavy crude oil and bitumen.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.