Many natural phenomena in geophysics and hydrogeology involve the flow of non-Newtonian fluids through natural rough-walled fractures and unconsolidated granular porous media. Therefore, there is considerable interest in predicting the pressure drop generated by complex flow in these media under a given set of boundary conditions. However, this task is markedly more challenging than the...
Viscoelastic surfactant solutions have a wide range of applications across many industries. In oil and gas applications, they are often used as hydraulic fracturing or displacement fluids due to their low damage inside the porous media, and their ability to improve the displacement efficiency. Recently, the microscopic displacement efficiency has been related to the rheological behavior of the...
In enhanced oil recovery, foam is used for its inherent capability to act as a mobility control agent. Compared to conventional displacement fluids, such as surfactant and polymer solutions, foams contain up to about 95% less water, have tunable rheological characteristics, and leave behind less residue. However, foams are thermodynamically unstable, especially when exposed to hydrocarbons,...
A large number of applications in science and engineering involve the flow of non-Newtonian fluids in naturally-occurring and synthetic porous media. Examples include flow processes that are related to enhanced oil recovery, underground waste disposal, and groundwater contamination. In the recent years, a growing number of studies have been dedicated to investigate a wide variety of...
The effect of sulfate concentration and salinity on wettability alteration and crude oil-brine viscoelastic interfacial properties at elevated temperature was investigated in this work. Evidence exists that oil recovery can be improved through management of rock-fluid and fluid-fluid interactions. The multicomponent interfacial dynamic response is complex function of brine composition and...
Injection of a generic naphthenic acid blend to injection brine has been shown to increase oil recovery. The purpose of this work is to analyze the effect of several individual naphthenic acids on the oil-water interfacial dynamics. Acids were selected based on water solubility and structure; analysis of different structural characteristics of various acid groups was made to determine a...
Surfactant flooding is a chemical enhanced oil recovery (cEOR) technique where a low concentration of surfactant is added to the injection water. The surfactant reduces the oil/brine interfacial tension which, in return, increases the capillary number favoring the viscous mobilization of (capillary) trapped oil. In order to reduce the residual oil saturation significantly, ultra-low...
In relation with the potential applications of CO2 foam technology on Enhanced Oil recovery and carbon geological storage, the paper experimentally and numerically investigated the foam assisted CO2 displacement process in a water/oil pre-saturated porous media. Computational Tomography (CT) technology is employed to visualize the transient sweep process of CO2 foam flow in porous media and...
