Guar gum an oil or natural gas reservoir at a high pressure and flow rate. This cracks the reservoir rock and then props the cracks open. Water alone is too thin to be effective at carrying proppant sand, so guar gum is one of the ingredients added to thicken the slurry mixture and improve its ability to carry proppant. There are several properties which are important 1. Thixotropic: the fluid should be thixotropic, meaning it should gel within few hours. 2. Gelling and degelling: The desired viscosity changes over the course of a few hours. When the fracking slurry is mixed, it
Sol–gel process requires an excess of water and/or the use of a hydrolysis catalyst such as acetic acid or hydrochloric acid. Intermediate species including [(OR)−Si−(OH)] or [(OR)−Si−(OH)] may result as products of partial hydrolysis reactions. Early intermediates result from two partially hydrolyzed monomers linked with a siloxane [Si−O−Si] bond: or Thus, polymerization is associated with the formation of a 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensional network of siloxane [Si−O−Si] bonds accompanied by the production of H−O−H and R−O−H species. By definition, condensation liberates a small molecule, such as water or alcohol. This type of reaction can continue to build larger and larger silicon-containing molecules