Tese: Visualization in micromodels of oil displacement by O/W emulsions
Aluno(a) : Gabriel Barrocas de Oliveira CruzOrientador(a): Igor Braga
Área de Concentração: Termociências
Data: 03/10/2018
Link para tese/dissertação: http://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.acad.36095
Resumo: The efficiency of water flooding, the most common secondary recovery method in the oil industry, is limited by its non-uniform sweep pattern, originating from the formation of preferential paths because of the high mobility ratio between water and oil, and the high residual oil saturation, associated with capillary oil trapping. In order to improve oil recovery, different approaches have been suggested in the literature, with some of them based pore blocking and consequent water diversion, thus sweeping a bigger area of the reservoir and displacing more of the trapped oil. Pore blockage can be performed with different methods, one of which is emulsion flooding, with the disperse phase, composed by oil drops, acting as the agent responsible for the decreased water phase mobility. In this work, the fundamental mechanisms of emulsion flooding process was studied experimentally, by visualizing the pore-scale flow in a glass microfluidic device composed of a network of constricted channels, that models the main features of a porous media. The results show the effect of drop size and capillary number on the flow pattern, trapped oil ganglia size and residual oil recovery.