年間 12 号発行
ISSN 印刷: 1091-028X
ISSN オンライン: 1934-0508
Indexed in
NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSIENT FOAM FLOW CHARACTERISTICS IN TWO-LAYER HETEROGENEOUS POROUS MEDIA WITH EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATIONS
要約
Foam has found wide application in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and has shown promising potential for efficient CO2 geological storage. Although the process of current foam modeling is adequate, especially in transient foam flow characteristics in heterogeneous porous media, it is still at an immature stage. Previous studies based on transient foam models were too complex to be easily applied to practical situations. To address this lacuna, we used a simple but robust stochastic bubble population balance model involving only two variable parameters to study transient foam flow characteristics in heterogeneous porous media that consists of two parallel layers with different permeabilities. Our numerical results indicate that foam first propagates in a high-permeability layer, penetrates through the layer barrier, and finally floods through the lower-permeability layer. Pressure distribution that incorporates the bubble population dominates foam displacement behavior in heterogeneous porous media. In the case studied here, inlet water phase pressure increases from 0.1 to 0.24 MPa, accompanying the foam flooding process through the high-permeability layer. The resulting pressure difference between parallel layers, in the magnitude of 10-3 MPa, pushes the foam fluid through the layer barrier to displace 40% of the water in the low-permeability layer. We also carried out corresponding experiments to validate numerical work. We achieved good qualitative agreement on pressure and water saturation distributions between numerical and experimental results, confirming that the stochastic population balance model could easily and adequately act as a foam flow mechanism in heterogeneous porous media. This study provides an important starting point for future foam application to CO2 EOR and CO2 geological storage.
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Du Dongxing, Li Yingge, Zhang Dan, Dong Xu, Wang Fei, Chao Kun, Experimental study on the inlet behavior of CO2 foam three phase displacement processes in porous media, Experimental Thermal and Fluid Science, 103, 2019. Crossref
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Du Dongxing, Zhang Xu, Li Yingge, Zhao Di, Wang Fei, Sun Zhifeng, Experimental study on rheological properties of nanoparticle-stabilized carbon dioxide foam, Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering, 75, 2020. Crossref
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Li Yingge, Zhao Di, Du Dongxing, Computational study on the three phase displacement characteristics of foam fluids in porous media, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, 215, 2022. Crossref