Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2019
25th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
POLYMER CONCENTRATION, BRINE SALINITY AND TEMPERATURE EFFECTS ON XANTHAN GUM SOLUTIONS RHEOLOGY – A COMPLEMENTARY AND CHECK-UP STUDY
Submission Author:
Edgar Javier Rueda Rueda , SP
Co-Authors:
Edgar Javier Rueda Rueda, Rosangela Moreno
Presenter: Rosangela Moreno
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2019.COB2019-2215
Abstract
The polymer flooding is an Enhanced Oil Recovery technique used to improve the mobility ratio between the injection fluid and the oil in the reservoir. The solutions of the biopolymer xanthan gum exhibit a pseudoplastic behavior that can increase sweep efficiency. Some of the main factors influencing the flow behavior of injecting polymer solutions through the oil reservoir formation are the salinity of the solvent (the brine salinity used to make the polymer solution) and temperature. Therefore, this paper focuses on the viscosity behavior of the injection polymer solution as a function of polymer concentration, temperature, and salinity of the solvent. The impact of those variables in the xanthan gum solutions was evaluated according to the concentration regimes (dilute and semi-dilute) aiming to understand the performance of the polymeric solutions on reservoir conditions. The rheological measurements in xanthan gum solutions cover a range of polymer concentrations from 4000 ppm to 10 ppm, temperature varying between 25ºC to 78°C, and two types of solvents (synthetic seawater and deionized water). The power law is the expression used to fit the data of viscosity in function of shear rate in the pseudoplastic region for the whole range of temperatures, until 100 ppm, in lower concentrations a Newtonian behavior is assumed. The analysis of the critical concentration (C*) and both, diluted and semi-diluted conditions allow understanding the solution behavior in some exploitation sceneries.
Keywords
biopolymer, Rheology, regime concentration, Enhanced oil recovery, xanthan gum
