Polyacrylamide can be used for sludge dewatering, treating industrial waste water, sewage and purifying water, filtering aid, treatment of tail coal as well as oil industry for drilling, EOR and oil production etc .
Polyacrylamide is a synthetic water-soluble polymer made from monomers of acrylamide. PAM binds soil particles together. Once soil particles suspended in water are bound together by PAM, they settle out, so water has a harder time washing them out of the field. Water-soluble polymers like PAM have been known to benefit soil properties for a long time. Recently these polymers have gained renewed attention for their use in reducing irrigation-induced erosion, now that the cost of applying PAM has become economically feasible. Other uses of polymers like PAM include treatment of municipal water supplies, food packaging, adhesives, a boiler water additive, film former in the imprinting of soft-shell gelatin capsules, adjuvants in the manufacturing of paper and paperboard, and the list goes on and on.
After Soil Science (Bear 1952) published a set of papers that introduced water-soluble polymers as soil conditioners, the Company spent about 10 million dollars producing and marketing the water-soluble polymer Krilium during the 1950's. Krilium was not adopted by commercial agriculture. Although Krilium was able to reduce soil erosion and other problems associated with furrow irrigation run-off, it was too expensive to justify applying it on fields and the recommended application rates were just too high to be economically practical. Since then, more extensive research has been done, identifying water-soluble polymers for agricultural use and effective application rates.