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ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
NUMERICAL MODELLING OF MICRO-SCALE LIQUID-LIQUID DISPLACEMENT IN HOMOGENEOUS AND HETEROGENEOUS POROUS MEDIA
Submission Author:
Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle , ES , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle, Edson Soares, Renato Siqueira
Presenter: Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0053
Abstract
The displacement of one liquid by another is a fundamental fluid mechanics problem with many applications, such as the oil displacement in petroleum reservoirs. The oil recovery occurs typically in three stages. In the primary stage, the oil is produced by the internal pressures of the reservoir. Studies show that a small amount of oil is recovered in this stage, around 10%. In the second stage, generally, oil is recovered by injection of a Newtonian fluid (water or gas), resulting in an additional recovery. The residual oil that remains trapped in the porous after the secondary stage is still significant, on average, more than 50% of the original oil in geological reservoir. In the third stage (enhanced oil recovery), it is common to use polymer solutions after water-flooding, which can recover a significant additional amount of oil by changing the interfacial interaction between the fluids. Concerning Newtonian fluids injection, the dimensionless parameter that have more influence on the recovery process are the capillary number (Ca) and the viscosity ratio (Nμ). This study uses the numerical simulation to evaluate the influence of the capillary number and viscosity ratio on the displacement efficiency and the interfacial behaviour of a liquid-liquid displacement. The open source software Basilisk© has been applied in many of studies, especially those that evaluate interfacial phenomena, and for these reason, it was used as the solver for the simulations in this paper. The software use Cartesian adaptive meshes, which allows the refinement of the fluids and solid interfaces to accurately track its position. The numerical model is a simplified micro-scale porous media, with homogeneous and heterogeneous disposition of grains in order to evaluate the heterogeneity effects on the oil recovery. The preliminary results show that the injection of a more viscous fluid have a better displacement efficiency on either homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media, and the capillary number can have different behaviours, depending of the grains disposition. Normally, the heterogeneous porous media retain more oil than the homogeneous one due to the existence of preferential paths on low resistance locations.
Keywords
Interfacial phenomena, viscosity ratio, capillary number, Homogeneous porous media, Heterogeneous porous media
