Experimental Study on Separation of Light Hydrocarbon Gas by PDMS Separation Membrane in Drilling Fluid

Throughout deep and ultra-deep drilling operations, gases originating from geological formations can ingress into the wellbore via mechanisms such as underbalanced gas infiltration and gravitationnal displacement. Current methodologies for gas intrusion detection predominantly encompass surface flow monitoring, mud pit incremental analysis, and acoustic sensing. Nevertheless, these techniques exhibit suboptimal detection efficiency and an incapacity to promptly recognize early warning indicators of gas infiltration, among other challenges. To tackle the issue of early gas infiltration monitoring, experimental investigations were carried out to evaluate the efficacy of a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) gas separation membrane in conjunction with gas chromatography for the separation of multi-component gas mixtures. The experimental findings indicate that the PDMS membrane demonstrates favorable gas permeation properties with a distinct linear correlation in gas volume fractions between both sides of the membrane. These research results offer vital benchmark data for subterranean gas separation detection technologies.