Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Evaluation of shear-thinning and shear-thickening fluids applied for enhanced oil recovery in heterogeneous porous medium
Submission Author:
Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle , ES , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle, Renato Siqueira, Edson Soares
Presenter: Edson Soares
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0719
Abstract
The increase of the fraction of extracted oil in petroleum reservoirs is one of the greatest challenges of the petroleum industries, since the oil corresponds to one of the most important energy resources. One of the most useful methods to increase the oil recovery is the injection of a fluid on the reservoir to displace the oil. The primary motivation of this work is to evaluate the liquid-liquid displacement on a heterogeneous porous medium using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The Basilisk© software is an open source code used to solve complex flows, in special those with interfacial phenomena. The porosity of the porous medium is ϕ = 0.7, the range of evaluated viscosity ratio 0.2 ≤ Nμ ≤ 40 and capillary number 0.02 ≤ Ca ≤ ∞. The injected fluid has Newtonian, shear-thinning and shearthickening characteristics with Power-Law index range 0.5 ≤ n ≤ 1.5. It is observed that while the viscosity ratio decreases, the amount residual oil that remains trapped in the porous media reduce due to the increase of the shear-stress imposed by the injected fluid. For Nμ > 1, the increase in the interfacial tension makes the interface flat, assisting the displacement , while for Nμ < 1, the increase of the interfacial tension reduces the sweep on minor pores, so, more of the recovered fluid is left behind. The Pseudo-plasticity was evaluated at low interfacial tension. It was observed that the shear-thinning fluid recovers more fluid than the Newtonian or shear-thickening fluids. Due to the tendency of the injected fluid to pass through the largest pores, the velocity and consequently the shear-rate on minor pores is low, contributing to the increase in the local viscosity of the shear-thinning fluid and also increasing its capability to displace the oil.
Keywords
Enhanced oil recovery, viscosity ratio, capillary number, shear thinning fluid, shear thickening fluid
