In this article, experiments and simulations were conducted to evaluate performance of surfactant-nanoparticles foam for enhanced oil recovery under high temperature. Experimentally, the displacement behavior of surfactant-nanoparticles foam for enhanced oil recovery was studied by micromodel tests at 90 °C. The recovery performance of surfactant-nanoparticles foam flooding was analyzed by sandpack flooding experiments at 150 °C. Theoretically, a mechanistic model of surfactant-nanoparticles foam flooding was constructed. The micromodel tests indicate that the surfactant-nanoparticles foam was more stable than that of the surfactant foam in the porous media at 90 °C. The surfactant-nanoparticles foam could accumulated in the pores with less oil and increase the swept area. The crude oil could be emulsified into oil droplets by surfactant-nanoparticles foam which can greatly enhance the oil recovery. The sandpack flooding results show that the surfactant-nanoparticles foam had better recovery performance at 150 °C. Compared with the surfactant foam, the surfactant-nanoparticles foam produced from the sandpack flooding experiment had a smaller average particle size and higher sphericity. A mechanistic model of surfactant-nanoparticles foam flooding was constructed. A good match was achieved between the numerical simulation and sandpack flooding experiments in terms of pressure and oil recovery by adjusting the model parameters. The simulation study indicates that the performance of surfactant-nanoparticles foam flooding is better than that obtained by surfactant foam flooding under high temperature.
Foam is widely used as a selective blocking agent through mobility control in oil field development. Its flow behavior in porous media has been investigated sufficiently, but few studies were carried out to understand the change of foam texture in flow. In this work, sandpack and micromodel experiments were conducted simultaneously to analyze foam flow behavior from the perspective of foam texture. Based on the measured flowing pressure and the observed foam image, the correlation between blocking pressure and foam texture was quantitatively investigated. The blocking pressure has a strong correlation with average diameter (-0.906) and variation coefficient (-0.78) and has a positive correlation with the filling ratio (0.84). These indicate that the blocking performance of foam is influenced by its texture closely. But path analysis shows only that the average diameter and variation coefficient have a significant direct effect on blocking pressure (-0.624 and -0.404). These show that the blocking capacity of foam is mainly influenced by the size and uniformity of bubbles. Tiny, dense, and homogeneous foam has a stronger blocking capacity. This study provides a deep insight of foam flow in porous media.
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