Modeling of Co-current Spontaneous Imbibition Oil Recovery from Partially Covered Homogeneous Hydrocarbon Reservoir

In this paper, an approximate integral equation solution for a horizontal, unsteady flow of two viscous incompressible fluids is derived. Wettability variation of the porous medium is also considered in the present study. The non-wetting phase recovery fraction is obtained in terms of dimensionless...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transport in porous media 2019-12, Vol.130 (3), p.947-968
Main Authors: Ghosh, Tufan, Raja Sekhar, G. P., Deb, Debasis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Civil Engineering
Classical and Continuum Physics
Computational fluid dynamics
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Empirical analysis
Fluid flow
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hydrogeology
Hydrology/Water Resources
Imbibition
Incompressible flow
Incompressible fluids
Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering
Integral equations
Oil recovery
One dimensional models
Porous media
Stability
Stability analysis
Unsteady flow
Waterfronts
Wettability
Wetting
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Summary:In this paper, an approximate integral equation solution for a horizontal, unsteady flow of two viscous incompressible fluids is derived. Wettability variation of the porous medium is also considered in the present study. The non-wetting phase recovery fraction is obtained in terms of dimensionless time for 1D model from the derived solution. The derived approximate recovery fraction has been compared with the existing experimental data and empirical correlations for spontaneous imbibition from water-wet medium. It is observed that the normalized water saturation profiles show sharp gradients indicating some instability of the water front. Hence, a linear stability analysis is developed to study viscous instability of the co-current spontaneous imbibition. Viscous instability phenomenon for a two-phase oil–water system is also discussed. The corresponding instability number related to co-current imbibition recovery is estimated. The present study clearly spells out the effect of the instability number on the recovery process and estimates a critical instability number for co-current spontaneous imbibition.
ISSN:0169-3913
1573-1634
DOI:10.1007/s11242-019-01349-0