Xanthan is a bacterial polysaccharide that is much used in industrial applications as stabilizer and texturant. Xanthan gum is also used in flocculation in food, petroleum (in process of perforations for oil recovery), pharmaceutical, cosmetics, paint, textile and agricultural products (in suspensions, as an agent for stabilizing herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers and fungicides). For this reason the dynamic mechanical properties of xanthan in aqueous solution have been investigated extensively
In this articlewe are interested inthe use ofxanthan gumin the oil sector, mainly in the oil recovery. At present, xanthan gum is one of the two commonly water-soluble polymers used for polymer flooding, and makes a more excellent performance in salt resistance than that of hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) in EOR.
The objective of this study, was first to characterize the xanthan gum and analyze the chemical composition from the data collected by the infred spectra, 1H NMR, X-ray diffractometry, thermal properties and obtain information of rheological behavior in order to provide basic data for the application of xanthan gum in EOR.