Key Words:carbon dioxide; foam; heterogeneous porous media; pressure distribution; dynamic propagation behavior
Abstract:Carbon dioxide foam technology has great application prospects for enhancing oil recovery and CO2 underground storage. In this study, the pressure distribution was measured in heterogeneous porous media packed with two- and three-layer quartz sand of different particle sizes by setting pressure transducers on different layers. Computed tomography (CT) was also carried out to visualize the dynamic propagation behavior of CO2 foam flow in heterogeneous porous media. A pressure difference between parallel layers, which is much smaller than the pressure drop along the flow direction, was observed from the measurements. Corresponding CT images revealed the injected foam would primarily flow through the layer with the largest particle size, break through that layer, and then penetrate to the neighboring layer packed with smaller particles due to the pressure difference across the layer. The foam propagation process continued until it swept all the layers in the heterogeneous porous media. The experimental results properly validated the modeling and numerical studies, indicating good performance of CO2 foam on smoothing heterogeneities for its use in essential field applications such as in enhanced oil recovery and CO2 geological storage
Volume:7
Issue:4
Translation or Not:no