In this project we aim to measure flow velocities in porous media. We demonstrate our method in a rectangular flow channel, for which a semi-analytical solution of the flow field exists. The flow channel is made of borosilicate glass and its refractive index is matched with the fluid. Upon doping of the fluid with microspheres, those particles can be tracked to reveal the velocity field of the...
ABSTRACT
Two-phase flow in porous media is a process encountered in various applications such as oil recovery, soil remediation, CO2 sequestration and many other industrial systems. Multiphase flow in porous has been experimentally investigated with the use of micro-models, as well as natural porous media. Up to now, fluid pressure measurements during two-phase flow experiments in...
Multiphase flow in porous media is relevant to a range of applications in the energy and environmental sectors. Recently, the interest has been renewed by geological storage of CO$_2$ within saline aquifers. The coupled flow dynamics of CO$_2$ and brine in geologic media must be better understood, particularly at the pore scale, because pore-scale phenomena, such as Haines jumps and...
The objective of this work is to use micromodels to investigate the feasibility of using viscous microemulsions to mobilize oil in fractured, oil-wet porous media by inducing crossflow. Production by water flooding from fractured oil-wet media, such as carbonates, is challenging because capillary forces prevent water imbibition into the matrix. Recently, experimental core floods (Parra et...
Nanoparticle stabilized emulsions have attracted interest for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) because of their improved stability to coalescence over emulsions stabilized with surfactants. This behavior is due to the irreversible adsorption of nanoparticles to the oil/water interface which can inhibit droplet coalescence. However, characterization of nanoparticle stabilized emulsions for EOR has...
Micromodels have been widely used to study the transport mechanism of fluids at pore-scale for subsurface engineering applications such as enhanced oil recovery. Micromodels with small feature sizes can be manufactured by lithography-based microfabrication on Si or glass, but they are in general restricted to 2D representation of pore network geometry. Recently our group demonstrated more...
During geologic CO2 sequestration, most of the storage domain far from the injection sites is likely to be dominated by buoyancy and capillary forces. Under such flow regimes, small scale geological heterogeneities have been shown to dampen plume migration rates and cause trapping beneath capillary barriers. To understand the impact of such heterogeneities on CO2 trapping processes...
CO2 storage in deep geologic formations is a necessary method to address the climate change problem. To ensure long-term security of the injected CO2, a better understanding of the post-injection CO2 residual trapping phenomena is needed. Using multiphase coreflooding experimental methods, we seek to characterize and predict the amount of CO2 residual trapping after injection.
Spatial...
Multimodal conglomerate rocks have complicated structure depending on the packing state and the relative proportions of sand and pebble-sized grains in the rock. The relation between porosity and permeability, and porosity and water saturation, in multimodal conglomerate rocks quite different from those common in clastic reservoirs having unimodal grain-size distributions. The characterization...
