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Waterflooding of Surfactant and Polymer Solutions in a Porous Media Micromodel
Version 1
: Received: 1 May 2018 / Approved: 3 May 2018 / Online: 3 May 2018 (05:52:37 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Yeh, H.-L.; Juárez, J.J. Waterflooding of Surfactant and Polymer Solutions in a Porous Media Micromodel. Colloids Interfaces 2018, 2, 23. Yeh, H.-L.; Juárez, J.J. Waterflooding of Surfactant and Polymer Solutions in a Porous Media Micromodel. Colloids Interfaces 2018, 2, 23.
Abstract
In this study, we examine microscale waterflooding in a randomly close-packed porous medium. Three different porosities are prepared in a microfluidic platform and saturated with silicone oil. Optical video fluorescence microscopy is used to track the water front as it flows through the porous packed bed. The degree of water saturation is compared to water containing two different types of chemical modifiers, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP), with water in the absence of a surfactant used as a control. Image analysis of our video data yield saturation curves and calculate fractal dimension, which we use to identify how morphology changes the way an invading water phase moves through the porous media. An inverse analysis based on the implicit pressure explicit saturation (IMPES) simulation technique uses mobility ratio as an adjustable parameter to fit our experimental saturation curves. The results from our inverse analysis combined with our image analysis show that this platform can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of surfactants or polymers as additives for enhancing the transport of water through an oil-saturated porous medium.
Keywords
porous media; optical video microscopy; microfluidics; waterflooding; surfactants; polymers
Subject
Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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