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
Water gel explosive nitroparaffins typically make up most of the water gel explosive. Different types of gelling agents are used to create the water gel explosive. One agent is insoluble in water, but able to gel with nitromethane. The gel used for nitromethane is cyanoethylether, a derivative of galactomannan gum. Other agents are water-soluble and are used for the aqueous salt solution. As referenced in the first paragraph, water-soluble gums and gel modifiers like guar can be used for the gelling of aqueous solutions. When the salt solution and nitroparaffin are gelled, the entire mixture is combined and mixed together until the desired