Experimental Study on Expansion Characteristics of Core-Shell and Polymeric Microspheres

Traditional polymeric microsphere has several technical advantages in enhancing oil recovery. Nevertheless, its performance in some field application is unsatisfactory due to limited blockage strength. Since the last decade, novel core-shell microsphere has been developed as the next-generation prof...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of nanotechnology 2018-01, Vol.2018 (2018), p.1-9
Main Authors: Liu, Tongjing, Zhang, Yunbao, Sun, Liangliang, Wang, Jia, You, Zhenjiang, Hou, Jirui, Jiang, Baoyi, Diwu, Pengxiang, Ju, Ye
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Emulsion polymerization
Enhanced oil recovery
Experiments
Hydration
Laboratories
Lasers
Microspheres
Morphology
Oil fields
Oil recovery
Particle size
Permeability
Petroleum
Polymer chemistry
Polymers
Salinity
Water flooding
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Summary:Traditional polymeric microsphere has several technical advantages in enhancing oil recovery. Nevertheless, its performance in some field application is unsatisfactory due to limited blockage strength. Since the last decade, novel core-shell microsphere has been developed as the next-generation profile control agent. To understand the expansion characteristic differences between these two types of microspheres, we conduct size measurement experiments on the polymeric and core-shell microspheres, respectively. The experimental results show two main differences between them. First, the core-shell microsphere exhibits a unimodal distribution, compared to multimodal distribution of the polymeric microsphere. Second, the average diameter of the core-shell microsphere increases faster than that of the polymeric microsphere in the early stage of swelling, that is, 0–3 days. These two main differences both result from the electrostatic attraction between core-shell microspheres with different hydration degrees. Based on the experimental results, the core-shell microsphere is suitable for injection in the early stage to block the near-wellbore zone, and the polymeric microsphere is suitable for subsequent injection to block the formation away from the well. A simple mathematical model is proposed for size evolution of the polymeric and core-shell microspheres.
ISSN:1687-9503
1687-9511
DOI:10.1155/2018/7602982