New Laboratory Core Flooding Experimental System

作者：Baldygin Aleksey; Nobes David S; Mitra Sushanta K^*

来源：Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 2014, 53(34): 13497-13505.

DOI：10.1021/ie501866e

This paper focuses on finding ways to improve the traditional core flooding experimental setup that has been used by the reservoir engineers over the past decades. The new proposed setup can be used in contemporary studies related to enhanced oil recovery. This setup has a possibility of using different flooding agents, e.g., surfactant, polymer, emulsion, oil and water. It also includes an automated effluent analysis, which has been developed to provide estimates on oil recovery efficiency. For validation purposes, the core flooding setup has been tested with an unconsolidated one-dimensional sand pack as a porous medium. Traditional water flooding experiments with paraffin oil and water were conducted at first. Also, two types of emulsion flooding techniques were tested for the sand packs: the direct emulsion flooding and the water flooding followed by the emulsion flooding as an example to exploit the capability of the new setup to successfully perform enhanced oil recovery techniques. Hence, this setup provides a valuable tool for the reservoir engineers to test the different flooding strategies in a laboratory scale experiment, before committing to huge resources in terms of man-power and cost in actual drilling operations in oil reservoirs.

• 出版日期2014-8-27