Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2017
24th ABCM International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Flow Rate Effect on Polymer Reversible Retention in Sandstone
Submission Author:
Vitor Hugo Sousa Ferreira , SP , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Rosangela Moreno, Vitor Hugo Sousa Ferreira
Presenter: Vitor Hugo Sousa Ferreira
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2017.COB17-0896
Abstract
Polymer enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is beneficial to the economics of oil recovery projects because it reduces produced and injected water and anticipates oil recovery. However, the added polymer mass represents an extra cost to the EOR project. Polymer retention mechanisms strip polymer from the solution as the front advances through the reservoir. Therefore, polymer retention measurement is necessary to evaluate the economic feasibility of a polymer flooding project. During the development of an oil field, changes in injection strategy, well conditions or inclusion of new wells can modify the flow rate conditions throughout the reservoir. These changes in flow rate can release trapped polymer or influence the retention of more polymer. This non-permanent retention is named reversible retention. The objective of this paper is to investigate the flow rate influence in the reversible retention of a terpolymer in sandstone and to do that we use a modified version of the double polymer bank method in the experiments. Four different flow rates are evaluated (between 0.4cm³/min and 1.0cm³/min) in both increasing and decreasing fashions. A UV-spectrophotometer measured the polymer concentration in the effluents. The results show that this retention phenomenon is closely related to the flow rate, due to hydrodynamic effects. The results demonstrate higher reversibility for increasing flow rates when compared with the decreasing flow rate ones. Additionally, the reversible retention increases as the flow rates increments. The reversible retention of polymer in our experiments ranged from 5μg/g to 24.4μg/g. These results are consistent with other literature data.
Keywords
Polymer Flooding, Polymer Retention, Reversible Retention, Hydrodynamic Retention, Flow Rate Effect
