Improving hydrocarbon recovery from reservoirs needs both a better understanding of fluid flow through the reservoir porous media and new technologies. This paper addresses the later. Early steam breakthrough, unknown heat distribution and existing exploitation policies inhibit recovery of the remaining reserve of millions of barrels of heavy oil. Integrated reservoir studies and numerical simulations results indicated that proper reservoir management practices such as, reservoir monitoring, heat management, and reservoir characterization can improve final recovery. In order to better manage heat distribution in heavy oil reservoirs, it is required that vertical and areal distribution of temperature fronts are known. Permanent well-bore temperature distribution profile was obtained by means of the deployment of a 2,500 ft-long fiber optic cable in two parallel SAGD horizontal wells in Tia Juana field, western Venezuela. A laser bean is sent through the fiber cable and its reflections are collected by a computer, which transforms light reflections into distributed temperature profile information. Distributed temperature profile when compare to resistivity logs easily indicates and correlates which pay zones are being contacted by steam. Distributed temperature profile information allows reservoir engineers and operators to anticipate which horizons are being swept by steam and which are not. Proper actions on the injection profile can be made in order to improve spatial steam distribution and heat management. Fiber optics applications also include pipeline monitoring, horizontal well production profiles, electrosubmersible pump monitoring, cross-flow detection, gas lift valve performance, energy management and other general safety application.
A Liquid-Liquid Cylindrical Cyclone separator (LLCC) is a device used in the petroleum industry to separate the oil-water mixture obtained from the well. The use of this device has not been widespread due to the lack of tools for predicting its separation capability. This paper presents a numerical and experimental study of the fluid dynamic performance of this type of cylindrical cyclone separators. The use of numerical simulations would reduce the time and cost necessary to obtain information for predicting the behavior of the equipment. The objective of this study is to determine if CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) techniques are able to reproduce the behavior of a LLCC separator. The CFD software examined was ANSYS-CFX 5.6 TM and numerical simulations were carried out using the dispersed model with oil as the dispersed phase. The oil and water mixture entering the separator is divided due to centrifugal and buoyancy forces in an upper (oil rich) exit and a bottom (water rich) exit. The separation capability is determined as the maximum amount of water removed from the mixture with the minimum amount of oil content in the water rich exit. The experiments were conducted in a transparent LLCC separator that allows the visualization of the mixture and the measurement of the oil content. Experiments were conducted for three variables: mixture velocity and water content at the entrance, and the split ratio. The split ratio is defined as the bottom exit flow rate divided by the water flow rate at the entrance. The results showed that CFD tools are able to reproduce the oil content obtained from the experiments for all analyzed conditions. Additionally, the mixture distribution images from numerical and experimental data showed good agreement. This study confirms the capacity of CFD tools for the multiphase flow analysis of LLCC separators.
The numerical simulation of a static T-type mixer for turbulent mixing of miscible liquids is reported. The simulation was carried out using CFX, a commercial computational fluid dynamic simulator. The effect of mixing intensification caused by turbulence generators placed downstream of the injection point of the Tee was evaluated in terms of reduction in mixing length for a given mixture quality, uniformity of turbulence intensity and efficiency of energy conversion to useful mixing energy.The mixing quality for an intensified and conventional T-type mixer was compared, and the turbulence generator geometry was optimized. Main stream Reynolds numbers between 50000 and 100000 were considered for additive volume ratios in the range 0.1 -10%. Selected simulations were validated with experimental data available in the literature for conventional smooth T-type mixers (no ribs).Results were in good agreement with experimental correlations available at high Reynolds numbers.Simulations demonstrated that mixing enhancement was efficient with turbulence generators, extending the Reynolds number range for which compact, low pressure-drop devices may be used for intense mixing. The optimum geometry for turbulence generators was evaluated using criteria based on energetic and spatial efficiency and in all cases the simple Tee was used as the point of reference.Finally, practical design correlations are presented to enable the mixing quality of two miscible streams to be estimated for a simple Tee with and without additional turbulence generators over a range of Reynolds numbers and injection conditions.
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