Experimental Study of Micro Silica Behavior and Its Effect on Iraqi Cement Performance by Using X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis

Abstract

The cement slurry is a mixture of cement, water and additives which is established at the surface for injecting inside hole. The compressive strength is considered the most important properties of slurry for testing the slurry reliability and is the ability of slurry to resist deformation and formation fluids. Compressive strength is governed by the sort of raw materials that include additives, cement structure, and exposure circumstances. In this work, we use micro silica like pozzolanic materials. Silica fume is very fine noncrystalline substantial. Silica fume can be utilized like material for supplemental cementations for increasing the compressive strength and durability of cement. Silica fume has very fine particles size less than 1 micron and by an average of about 0.1 microns, about 100 times slighter than particles of cement. We are adding 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% micro silica by wt. of cement. The results showed that adding micro silica enhance the performance of Iraqi cement but also leads to a slight decrease in thickening time. To avoid this problem, super plasticizer is used to make the process of cement pumping more easily, in other words, increase thickening time and increase compressive strength. The experimental work showed that adding micro silica leads to reduce free water and this property is very important through horizontal drilling. X-ray fluorescence technique delivers beneficial elemental information about the chemical structure of Iraqi cement to help us use it without causing damage through the cementing job. In this paper, some outlines of the XRF device and its main applications are presented. By using X-ray fluorescence analysis, we detect the problem of Iraqi cement and solve it in this paper to use it at cementing jobs in the Iraqi field instead of using imported cement.