Development of the Fracturing Proppant with Low Density and High Strength Using High Alumina Fly Ash

摘要

High-alumina(Al)fly ash,typically defined to be comprised of greater than 35% alumina,is considered as a valuable resource as a potential replacement to bauxite for making aluminum,refractory materials,and proppants,etc.The performance requirements and process to make proppants are introduced.This paper presents the recent development of the low density,high performance proppants using high Al fly ash at NICE.The low density proppant developed by NICE using high Al fly ash exhibits properties at least equal or better than commercial available bauxite-based products.This new fly-ashbased technology has many advantages in comparison with the conventional bauxitebased technology: 1)more energy-saving(no need to crush and calcine bauxite and lower sintering temperature)than that of the conventional process,and 2)greener raw material since the composition has more than 80% high Al fly ash.This new proppant material technology has been validated and been successfully produced by a commercial scale proppant manufacturing in China.