Polyacrylamide (PAM) is a synthetic water-soluble polymer with unique properties such as thickening, flocculation, and drag reduction. It plays a crucial role in numerous fields including water treatment, oil extraction, papermaking, textile printing and dyeing, and pharmaceuticals. With technological advancements and heightened environmental demands, polyacrylamide has become an indispensable chemical additive across multiple industries, highly valued for its efficiency, stability, and cost-effectiveness.
Polyacrylamide is a linear polymer synthesized from acrylamide monomers. Its molecular chain contains numerous amide groups (–CONH₂), conferring excellent solubility and reactivity in water. Based on molecular structure, PAM is classified into nonionic, anionic, cationic, and amphoteric types, each exhibiting distinct properties and applications.
- High solubility: Rapidly dissolves in cold water to form transparent solutions.
- High molecular weight: Typically ranging from several million to tens of millions, determining its flocculation and thickening capabilities.
- Diverse functionality: Exhibits comprehensive properties including flocculation, drag reduction, thickening, and gelation.
- High Environmental Adaptability: Molecular structure can be tailored to specific application environments, meeting diverse industrial demands.
Water treatment represents the most extensive application area for polyacrylamide. Whether in municipal sewage, industrial wastewater, or drinking water purification, PAM plays a crucial role.
- Flocculant Function: PAM's long molecular chains effectively adsorb suspended particles in water, promoting their aggregation into larger flocs to accelerate sedimentation and filtration.
- Clarity Enhancement: It efficiently removes suspended solids, colloidal particles, and organic impurities from water, resulting in clearer, more transparent effluent.
- Extensive Applications: PAM has become the representative high-efficiency flocculant in treating paper mill wastewater, textile dyeing effluent, mining tailings water, and metallurgical wastewater.
In drinking water treatment, polyacrylamide is often used in combination with inorganic flocculants (such as polyaluminum chloride). Through synergistic effects, it significantly enhances purification efficiency while ensuring water safety, reducing turbidity and bacterial content.
In complex water conditions like high salinity or hardness, PAM's molecular structure can be optimized through modification to maintain flocculation performance. This makes it highly suitable for wastewater treatment projects in coastal industrial parks and petrochemical bases.
Polyacrylamide is equally prevalent in petroleum extraction, playing a crucial role particularly in tertiary oil recovery and drilling operations. As extraction challenges intensify, its enhanced recovery capabilities become increasingly significant. Key industrial applications include:
(1) Oil Displacement Agent: By increasing the viscosity of injected water and enhancing its wetting coefficient, polyacrylamide improves oil recovery efficiency. This technique, known as polymer flooding, constitutes tertiary oil recovery. The thickening effect of polyacrylamide solutions effectively reduces interfacial tension between oil and water in reservoirs, displacing trapped crude oil and significantly boosting recovery rates.
(2) Filtration loss reducer: During drilling operations, polyacrylamide serves as a mud loss reducer by minimizing water migration from drilling fluids into formations. This effectively protects wellbore integrity, prevents wall collapse, and enhances drilling safety and efficiency. Additionally, polyacrylamide stabilizes drilling mud, reduces fluid loss, and improves drilling quality.
(3) Water Blocking Agent: During the later stages of oil extraction, significant water injection occurs in the wellbore, leading to reduced oil production. As an excellent water blocking agent, polyacrylamide selectively seals high-permeability formations, reducing water phase permeation and thereby increasing oil well output.
In the pulp and paper industry, polyacrylamide holds significant application value, primarily used to enhance the dry and wet strength of paper and improve pulp dewatering efficiency. Polyacrylamide performs the following functions during the papermaking process:
(1) Retention Aid: As a retention aid, polyacrylamide effectively anchors fine fibers, fillers, and other solid particles within the paper structure, reducing loss and thereby improving pulp utilization.
(2) Strengthener: Through its viscous properties, polyacrylamide increases both dry and wet strength of paper, making finished products more resilient and tear-resistant. Its reinforcing effect is particularly pronounced in high-strength paper products like tissue paper, industrial packaging paper, and paper towels.
(3) Efficiency Enhancers: Polyacrylamide also improves pulp flowability and dewatering properties, shortening drying times to boost production efficiency and reduce energy consumption.
Beyond water treatment, oil extraction, and papermaking, polyacrylamide plays irreplaceable roles in other industrial sectors:
(1) Textile and Dyeing Industry: In textiles and dyeing, polyacrylamide is widely used as a sizing agent, thickener, and adhesive for fabrics. It enhances yarn strength and smoothness while reducing breakage rates. Additionally, as a thickener in dyeing processes, it ensures uniform color distribution and vibrant hues.
(2) Pharmaceutical Industry: In pharmaceutical formulations, polyacrylamide serves as a film-forming agent, binder, and stabilizer, widely applied in tablet production and sustained-release formulations. Furthermore, it is used to prepare hydrogel materials for medical contact lenses, offering excellent biocompatibility.
(3) Cosmetics Industry: Due to its excellent moisturizing and thickening properties, polyacrylamide is used as an emulsifier and stabilizer in cosmetics. It enhances product texture, making it smoother and more spreadable, and is widely applied in skincare products, shampoos, and body washes.
(4) Construction Materials Industry: The thickening properties of polyacrylamide are also applied in construction materials. For instance, in cement mortar and gypsum board production, it enhances workability and adhesion, facilitating construction operations.
- High Efficiency: Achieves optimal results with minimal dosage, offering low consumption and high efficiency.
- Adaptability: Molecular structure can be modified based on water quality, oil layer characteristics, and pulp types to flexibly meet diverse requirements.
- Cost-effectiveness: Compared to other additives, PAM often delivers superior treatment results under identical conditions, reducing overall costs.
- Environmental Potential: Through optimized production processes and application methods, PAM's eco-friendliness continues to improve, aligning with green chemical trends.
Driven by increasing industrial demand and technological innovation, polyacrylamide's application domains will expand, particularly in environmental protection and resource conservation. Future development focuses on:
- Eco-friendly polyacrylamide: Traditional polyacrylamide production and use may pose environmental challenges. Future R&D will emphasize refining manufacturing processes and minimizing byproduct generation to achieve more sustainable products.
- Bio-based polyacrylamide: With advances in biotechnology, scientists are exploring microbial synthesis or plant extraction as alternatives to petrochemical feedstocks for polyacrylamide production. This approach aims to reduce dependence on fossil resources and meet green chemistry requirements.
- Smart polyacrylamide materials: Future developments will advance polyacrylamide toward functionalization and intelligent properties. For instance, incorporating responsive groups into molecular structures enables polyacrylamide to transform based on external conditions (e.g., temperature, pH), facilitating applications in smart materials and biomedicine.
Beyond these advancements, polyacrylamide's economic viability and operational efficiency remain critical in practical applications. Its widespread adoption across diverse sectors stems largely from its cost-effectiveness. As a polymer, polyacrylamide offers relatively moderate pricing and high operational efficiency, achieving desired outcomes with minimal dosage. Compared to other chemical additives, polyacrylamide offers superior adhesion, thickening properties, and water solubility at equivalent dosages. Due to this high-efficiency, low-consumption characteristic, it has progressively replaced certain traditional additives in industrial applications, becoming a key choice for enterprises seeking to enhance product quality and reduce production costs.
E-mail：jcl@jichanglong.com
WhatsApp：
Address：Block B, Polymer Materials Industry Innovation Park,No. 51, Lutai Avenue, High-tech Zone, Zibo City, Shandong ProvinceShandong Jichanglong Environmental Engineering Co., Ltd.
China Jichanglong specializes in vanadium inhibitors , dehumidification and drying block, calcium hypochlorite disinfectant tablet, polyacrylamide and other products. With over 20 years of experience, we offer quality assurance and wholesale prices.
