While wettability alteration is arguably the dominant factor controlling low salinity IOR in sandstones, the relative importance of mineral dissolution and wettability alteration through modified organic-mineral interaction for carbonate reservoirs is still under debate. In this study, we present a new method to directly visualize local dissolution/precipitation in model systems upon aging...
We present a computationally efficient methodology for stochastic inverse modeling of transient multi-phase flow at the core scale. We consider the availability of information combining temporal histories of pressure drop across a core sample as well as detailed three-dimensional spatial distributions of oil and brine saturations of the kind that can be observed through in situ X-ray...
Wetting a porous solid with a fluid is one of the most fundamental phenomena governing the multiphase flow in a porous medium for applications such as CO2 or H2 storage in geological reservoirs or oil and gas reservoirs. Quantifying wettability using contact angle is limiting due to the scale and heterogeneity of these reservoirs. Capturing the effect of flow and surface roughness while...
Capillary-driven flow in porous media is prevalent in nature and in industry, such as petroleum and hydraulic engineering as well as material and life sciences. Due to the numerous types and complex structures of porous media, together with a number of influencing factors, the study of capillary-driven flow based on theoretical analysis and numerical simulation methods is now widely carried...
The mathematical models for the capillary-driven flow of immiscible fluids in porous media are typically assuming a static contact angle at the moving contact line. However, the dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface, particularly of the contact angle is an important feature. Here, we consider the flow of two fluids in a single pore. The geometry is idealized to a long, thin tube with slowly...
When dry CO2 is sequestrated into saline aquifer, CO2 preferentially goes through high-permeability pathways, leaving the water in unswept low-permeability porous media evaporating into the CO2 phase. Similar scenarios that volatile liquids evaporate into high-permeability pathways can also be observed in gas condensate reservoir recovery, shale gas recovery, and fuel cell water management,...
Neglecting or simplifying capillary pressure is a common starting point for analyzing the fluid displacement in porous media. From the mathematical perspective, the effect of such simplifications was addressed in the context of conservation laws. In this talk, we address the issue in the context of traveling waves. Mainly, we are interested in the case of one-dimensional incompressible...
Foam injection in porous media is often used to control the gas fingering in multi-phase flow. Mathematical models of foam dynamics involve non-newtonian formulations. To numerically simulate these complex phenomena, experimental data is gathered and used to estimate the parameter values of models via optimization techniques. The present work improves this procedure by introducing a new...
Foam has the potential to significantly improve sweep efficiency in oil recovery, gas storage, and acidification processes. It can be used to solve problems caused by a thief zone or gravity override and in the remediation of contaminated sites. When foam is created in situ, it fills high permeability areas and diverts displacing fluid towards trapped oil, lowering the relative permeability of...
In an earlier study, we found that oil-water-surfactant systems can form foam-like emulsion phases under porous-media flow conditions (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcis.2021.10.022). Those phases are especially stable far outside optimum conditions as characterized by phase behavior experiments and displacement efficiency in microfluidics. The emulsion phase displaces the oil in film flow...
Particle manipulation in a liquid has many applications at different length scales: from size-based particle sorting in industrial production processes to cellular manipulation for bio-sensing and analysis in microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices. Many active methods employing various external fields, such as, optical, acoustic, magnetic and electrical have been used for tweezing particles,...
Non-wetting bubbles trapped inside porous solids are common to many applications including geologic CO2 storage, design of optimal components for fuel cells and electrolyzers, and cleanup of non-aqueous pollutant liquids from groundwater aquifers. Their evolution is dictated, almost entirely, by the complex geometry of the pore space to which the bubbles’ morphology must conform. As bubbles...
Polymer microcapsules refer to microsphere particles with a core-shell structure using polymer as the core. Microcapsule Polymer is a new type of oil-displacing reagent that is suitable for deep profile control which has broad application prospects in enhancing oil recovery. However, microcapsule polymer has obvious time-varying characteristics and its flow mechanism and oil displacement...
Fluid-fluid displacement in porous media occurs in many natural and engineering processes such as water infiltration into soil, geological carbon dioxide storage, and enhanced oil recovery. It has long been recognized that wettability plays an important role in the displacement process. For instance, the displacement pattern of a viscous ambient fluid by a less viscous invading fluid becomes...
Formation a droplet at the interface of a coupled porous medium-free flow system affects the behavior of the whole system by altering the interaction between the two domains. The droplet at the interface acts as an intermediary which not only handles the exchange between the free flow and the porous medium, but also stores mass and energy [1]. Furthermore, the droplet can experience a growth...
The unstable fluid-fluid displacement patterns in porous media with rough invasion fronts and trapping of the defending phase are often observed in drainage, i.e., when the solid is non-wetting to the invading phase. Reversely, during imbibition, compact and faceted growth is expected in regular porous media with geometrically homogeneous pore structure due to the favoured overlap event at the...
Shale rocks remain the least understood sedimentary rocks. In particular, shale rocks depict a complex wetting behavior which is arguably due to complex microstructure of shales. This work investigates wettability of shale/decane/brine systems as a function of pressure, temperature and brine salinity. Moreover, nano-fluid aged shale surfaces are also investigated to examine the potential...
In the context of bio-remediation of residual hydrocarbons in soils, we seek to understand the kinematics of mass exchange amongst the different phases of a polluted soil system namely the aqueous, oil or Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid (NAPL) and biofilm phases. In this work, we ran biodegradation experiments in 2D water-saturated porous media within which a residual NAPL phase has been established....
In this work we propose a numerical method for computing solutions to unsaturated flow equation within Gardner's framework. In order to do so, we resort to Kirchhoff transformation of Richards' equation in mixed form, obtaining a linear second order partial differential equation. Then, leveraging the mass balance condition, we integrate both sides of the equation over a generic grid cell and...
Displacement of crude oil with brine is one of the most widely implemented methods of oil production. The process is governed by the competition of surface and viscous forces. The polar components of crude oil adsorb at the oil/water interfaces, developing viscoelastic films that affect emulsion stability and adhere to reservoir rock minerals, making them more oil-wet and hindering oil...
Improving oil recovery from existing fields is an essential element in the energy transition to help meet the world’s energy demand in an efficient and sustainable manner while exploration for new fields is in decline. Many lab experiments and field trials have highlighted the potential of low salinity waterflooding (LSW) as a prominent enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique. The main...
Spontaneous imbibition is a fundamental flow mechanism that plays a significant role in oil extraction from subsurface reservoirs. Understanding the imbibition behavior, which is driven by capillarity relative to the interfacial forces between the immiscible fluids within the porous media, is essential for designing and optimizing IOR/EOR recovery schemes. Conventional lab experiments with...
Multiphase flows in porous media are central to many applications in the chemical industry, such as coating, infiltration of resin in composites, and reactive gas-liquid flows in gas diffusion electrodes. To improve these processes, a deep understanding of flow phenomena is crucial. Therefore, detailed simulation of multiphase flows is of great importance.
In this contribution, we present a...
In the context of soil remediation or oil extraction, foam flooding is useful to mitigate effects due to permeability contrast within the soil layers. For some applications, the liquid relative permeability of the foam-filled porous medium is a crucial parameter to control the liquid flow rate at which active substances or nutrients (for bacteria) can be delivered deep into the medium. In...
The addition of a small amount of water-soluble polymers (e.g. polyacrylamides and polyethylene glycol) to water can significantly affect the rheological response of aqueous solutions. These aqueous polymeric solutions have frequently been used to control the flow response of working solutions in several porous media applications, including chemical enhanced oil recovery. However, polymer...
