A systematic
CT-scan-aided laboratory study of N2 foam in Bentheimer
sandstone cores is reported. The aim of the study was to investigate
whether foam can improve oil recovery from clastic reservoirs subject
to immiscible gas flooding. Foam was generated in situ in water-flooded
sandstone cores by coinjecting gas and surfactant solution at fixed
foam quality. It was stabilized using two surfactants, namely, C14–16 α-olefin sulfonate (AOS) and mixtures of
AOS and a polymeric fluorocarbon (FC) ester. The effects of surfactant
concentration, injection direction, surfactant preflush, and core
length on foam behavior were examined in detail. Stable foams were
obtained in the presence of waterflood residual oil. It was found
that foam strength (mobility reduction factor) increases with surfactant
concentration. Foam development and, correspondingly, oil recovery
without surfactant preflush were delayed compared to the case with
preflush. Gravity-stable foam injection caused a rapid increase in
foam strength and an incremental oil recovery almost twice that for
unstable flow conditions. Core floods revealed that the incremental
oil recovery by foam was as much as (23 ± 2)% of the oil initially
in place after injection of 4.0 pore volumes (PV) of foam (equal to
the injection of 0.36 PV of surfactant solution). Incremental oil
recovery was only (5.0 ± 0.5)% for gas flooding under the same
injection conditions. It appears that oil production by foam flooding
occurs by the following main mechanisms: (1) residual oil saturation
to foam flooding is lower than that to water flooding; (2) formation
of an oil bank in the first few injected pore volumes, coinciding
with a large increase of capillary number; and (3) a long tail production
due to the transport of tiny oil droplets within the flowing foam
at a fairly constant capillary number. The observations of this study
support the concept that foam is potentially an efficient enhanced
oil recovery (EOR) method.
Summary
A detailed laboratory study of nitrogen-foam propagation in natural sandstones in the absence of oil is reported. The goal of this study was to elucidate further the mechanisms of foam mobility control. The C14–16 alpha-olefin sulfonate (AOS) surfactant was selected to stabilize foam. X-ray computed-tomography (CT) images were taken during foam propagation to map liquid saturation over time. Effects of surfactant concentration and of total injection velocity were examined in detail because these are key parameters for controlling foam strength and foam propagation under field conditions. The experiments revealed that foam mobility decreases in two steps: During initial forward foam propagation, foam mobility decreases by an order of magnitude compared with water mobility; during a secondary backward liquid desaturation, it decreases further by one to two orders of magnitude for sufficiently high surfactant concentrations. The steady-state mobility-reduction factor (MRF) increases considerably with both surfactant concentration and total injection velocity. A hysteresis was observed for a cycle of increasing/decreasing surfactant concentration or total injection velocity. The observed effects could be interpreted mechanistically in terms of surfactant adsorption and foam rheology. Implications for field application of foam for immiscible and miscible gas enhanced oil recovery (EOR) are discussed.
Studies on Mxene/alginate composite adsorption have opened up a new avenue for designing adsorbents possessing high adsorption capacity and high efficiency.
This paper describes the design of a multi-gigabit fiber-optic receiver with integrated large-area photo detectors for plastic optical fiber applications. An integrated 250 m diameter non-SML NW/P-sub photo detector is adopted to allow efficient light coupling. The theory of applying a fully-differential pre-amplifier with a single-ended photo current is also examined and a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier has been proposed to drive a of 14 pF to multi-gigahertz frequency. Both differential and common-mode operations of the proposed super-Gm transimpedance amplifier have been analyzed and a differential noise analysis is performed. A digitally-controlled linear equalizer is proposed to produce a slow-rising-slope frequency response to compensate for the photo detector up to 3 GHz. The proposed POF receiver consists of an illuminated signal photo detector, a shielded dummy photo detector, a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier, a variable-gain amplifier, a linear equalizer, a post amplifier, and an output driver. A test chip is fabricated in TSMC's 65 nm low-power CMOS process, and it consumes 50 mW of DC power (excluding the output driver) from a single 1.2 V supply. A bit-error rate of less than 10 has been measured at a data rate of 3.125 Gbps with a 670 nm VCSEL-based electro-optical transmitter.
Organic
nonvolatile memory with ultralow power consumption is a
critical research demand for next-generation memory applications.
However, obtaining a large-area, highly oriented ferroelectric ultrathin
film with low leakage current and stable ferroelectric switching remains
a challenge for achieving low operation voltage in ferroelectric memory
transistors. Here, an ideal ferroelectric neat PVDF ultrathin film
with a high degree of orientation is fabricated by a melt-draw technique
without post-thermal treatment and assisted stabilization process.
The PVDF ultrathin film is self-polarized with predominantly vertical
orientation of dipole moments, exhibiting a d
33 of 25 pm V–1 and the ultralow coercive
voltage of approximately 3 V characterized by piezoresponse force
microscopy. A remnant polarization of 6.3 μC cm–2 is identified based on a PVDF capacitor with an active layer formed
by six layers of melt-drawn thin films. By employing a single-layer
melt-drawn PVDF ultrathin film as an insulation layer, a bottom-gate-top-contact
ferroelectric field-effect transistor is fabricated with a very low
operation voltage of 5 V. It exhibits a memory window with an on/off
current ratio of 103 at zero gate bias and threshold voltage
shift of around 2 V.
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