Recommended polymer workflow: Interpretation and parameter identification

Abstract

Injecting a polymer solution into a porous medium significantly increases the modeling complexity, compared to model a polymer bulk solution. Even if the polymer solution is injected at a constant rate into the porous medium, the polymers experience different flow regimes in each pore and pore throat. The main challenge is to assign a macroscopic porous media “viscosity” to the fluid which can be used in Darcy law to get the correct relationship between the injection rate and pressure drop. One can achieve this by simply tabulating experimental results (e.g., injection rate vs pressure drop). The challenge with the tabulated approach is that it requires a huge experimental database to tabulate all kind of possible situations that might occur in a reservoir (e.g., changing temperature, salinity, flooding history, permeability, porosity, wettability etc.). The approach presented in this report is to model the mechanisms and describe them in terms of mathematical models. The mathematical model contains a limited number of parameters that needs to be determined experimentally. Once these parameters are determined, there is in principle no need to perform additional experiments.