Tese: 3D Visualization of Oil Displacement by a Suspension of Microcapsules
Aluno(a) : Raphael Chalhub Oliveira Spinelli RibeiroOrientador(a): Márcio Carvalho
Área de Concentração: Termociências
Data: 23/09/2019
Link para tese/dissertação: http://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.acad.51484
Resumo: Thanks to decay of new discoveries of oil and gas reserves in the past decades, oil companies have a growing interest in the increase of oil recovery efficiency. Commonly, after primary and secondary recovery phases, a large amount of oil remains inside the reservoir, as it becomes unprofitable to continue the extraction. Thus, the number of studies focused on enhanced oil recovery is growing, aiming to obtain a better recovery fraction. The focus of this work is to study the fundamentals of oil displacement in porous media using a confocal laser scanning microscope, which enables 3D visualization with a good resolution. The analysis is focused on oil displacement that results from the use of a suspension of gellan gum microcapsules in water injected after water injection. These microcapsules, moving along with the water, blocked some of the preferential paths and forced the water to displaces parcels of the trapped oil. The result achieved was a collection of 3D images from artificial porous media, in which it was possible to distinguish the distribution of phases (microcapsules, oil, and aqueous phases) inside the porous media, before and after the microcapsules injection. These images showed that indeed the gellan gum microcapsules blocked preferential water paths and that, after the blockage, some oil ganglia were displaced from their original positions. This thesis applies modern techniques of microscopy to investigate the concept behind enhanced oil recovery using microcapsules.