Liquid foams are a proposed solution to overcoming conformance issues while increasing apparent viscosity over gas/water only injections in petroleum reservoirs. However due to the diversity of flow behaviour foam flow in porous media providing a sufficiently accurate and low uncertainty model for industrial use can represent a significant challenge. Understanding the specifics of foam flow...
Foam injection is believed to be a promising technique to enhance oil recovery. One of the key characteristics of the foam and its rheology in porous media is its texture which describes the spatial distribution and size of the gas bubbles. Yet, the description of the texture of a foam confined in a real porous medium is a challenging issue because conventional methods do not have adequate...
Foam can improve sweep efficiency in gas-injection enhanced oil recovery. Surfactant-alternating-gas (SAG) is a favored method of injection, in part because of excellent injectivity during gas injection. However, liquid injectivity is usually very poor in a SAG process, and fracturing of the well can occur. We report a coreflood study of liquid mobility under conditions like those near an...
Steam injection has been implemented with residual oil saturation in swept zones being as low as 10% in the case of Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) processes. The primary difficulty with a gas injection of any kind is conformance due to low density and viscosity of the gas. Therefore, gases tend to form channels and pathways through oil rather than displacing the oil. Traditionally...
The foam efficiency in the oil displacement processes is governed by foam stability which is generally reduced with the presence of oil. In this study, we investigate the effect of oil type and saturation on foam strength in Berea sandstone cores using coreflooding and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging. Foam quality scan in the presence of remaining hexadecane showed higher apparent...
Mechanisms of pore gas transport and exchange across the porous medium-atmosphere interface in wind-exposed porous media was investigated for a range of porous media under different near-surface wind conditions.
Four dry porous media with mean particle diameters of 1.6, 2.0, 4.2 and 10.5 mm were used. These relatively coarse materials were selected, to facilitate easier identification of the...
We present recent results relevant for an application of level set methods to track moving interfaces and free boundaries. We cover the most important tasks typically required in level set methods like an advection of level set function, a preservation of signed distance property, and an extrapolation of missing data in the normal direction to the interface.
Typically a movement of the...
Accurate numerical simulations for density-dependent flow and transport model is one of the crucial keys for successful water resources management in coastal areas and on islands. However, traditional modeling approaches without special treatment may not be able to resolve accurate sharp moving fronts and corresponding groundwater flow velocities due to the numerical instabilities.
In this...
Kamal S. Bisht, Michael E. Dreyer, University of Bremen, Faculty of Production Engineering, Department of Fluid Mechanics, ZARM, University of Bremen, Germany
In propellant management devices (PMD), porous media are widely used for the phase separation process and delivery of vapor free propellant. However, instability of the free surface flows in open capillary channels limits the flow...
Wicking is the capillary phenomena by which a preferentially wetting liquid is drawn into a porous medium due to surface tension forces. The Washburn equation, governing the spontaneous invasion of a wetting fluid in a capillary was developed in the early 1900’s. The equation can also explain a wide variety of impregnation processes in homogeneous porous media effectively. However, there are...
Unsaturated flow through thin layers of porous media are encountered in many industrial applications, including the liquid-absorbing hygiene products such as wipes, paper towels, and diapers [1-4]. These consumer products demand specific absorbent properties with storage of liquid playing a significant role. Understanding fluid flow and deformation processes in thin swelling porous media is...
This paper investigates through reservoir simulations the set-up of a foam EOR process in a real sector of a low permeability reservoir produced by waterflooding. The objectives are: to demonstrate our capability to simulate foam injection at field scale; to investigate the technical feasibility of foam injection in terms of injectivity, foam stability and improved oil recovery; and to analyze...
