Sharif Digital Repository

Miscible displacement in fluid flowing through a porous medium plays an important role in many environmental and industrial applications; for instance, miscible displacements in enhanced oil recovery processes and pollutant spreading in groundwater. A large number of numerical approaches have been developed to solve the advection-dispersion equation that describes the behavior of miscible displacement in porous media. Most of these numerical models suffer from numerical dispersion. Random walk seems to be an effective method to overcome this problem especially in heterogeneous media. Here, a random walk model was developed and used for simulating miscible displacement in heterogeneous porous... 

Foam injection for enhanced oil recovery is concerned by petroleum engineers because it decreases adverse effects of fingering and gravity segregation caused by the injected fluid .Obviously foam stability is an important factor in the efficiency of this process. So investigating it is an imperative. One of the ways that less studied and can improve foam stability is using of nanoparticles. In this project effect of nanoparticles on foam stability and displacement mechanism during foam flooding has been discussed.
Study consisted of two sets of experiments. In the first part, the static foam stability in the presence of silica nanoparticles has been investigated. Also influence of... 

One the basic challenges during drilling of both vertical and horizontal wellbores is due to mud filtrate invasion into the formation. Addition of nanoparticles to composition of drilling fluid has been recognized as a measure of control and reduction of filtrate invasion. Despite notable advances in formulation of nano-enhanced drilling fluids, effects of surface wettability of nanoparticles on their performance have not been studied with any precision. Moreover, return permeability of a grain packed porous media after extreme invasion by mud filtrate has not been experimentally measured in a radial system, yet. The last but not least, Generation and development of mud cake opposite the... 

During production from gas condensate reservoirs, reservoir pressure decreses to lower than dew point pressure of the reservoir fluid. Consequently, condensates will form in near wellbore regions, which significantly decrease well productivity. One of the remediations that is recently proposed for solving this problem is wettability alteration of near wellbore region to gas wetting condition. In comparison to other methods, it provides a better permanency, which is its key advantage. The main purpose of this thesis is, quantitative, qualitative and modeling study of wettability alteration of rock to gas wetting condition and verification of modeling rsults for a reservoir rock sample. Also,... 

The purpose of this study was to investigate the experimental and modeling of the drop formation process on calcite rock and calcite aged in nano fluid surfaces in order to analyze size dependent contact angle and wettability modification. To do this, the calcite surfaces were prepared by cutting to an approximately size of 3*3*0.4 cm and grinded and polished to achieve different roughnesses. The purity and roughness of the samples were determined by X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy, respectively. In order to conduct the dynamic and static contact angle measurements on the calcite surface in vapor saturated condition, a small laboratory device was designed. The advanced contact... 

Gas injection as an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method usually suffers from low recovery efficiency. The low viscosity and density of gas as well as reservoir heterogeneity are the main reasons of early breakthrough and override of gas in oil reservoirs. To mitigate the poor sweep efficiency of gas injection, surfactants can be co-injected or injected in an alternating manner with gas to form foam within the reservoir rock. The foam formation can reduce the mobility of the injection fluids in porous media. A significant challenge of foam injection is the stability of the foam in formations and the foam liquid drainage rate is one of the key factors which characterize or show the efficiency... 

In the recent years, there has been an increasing attention toward usage of ultrasonic for enhanced oil recovery practices. But, thorough knowledge of active mechanisms and spreading and characterization of developed fingers during this practice is not available. From the other hand, due to limited amount of light oil fields, more attentions towards recovery from heavy oils is the need of the hour. Documents show that the big issues during the enhanced oil recovery from heavy crudes are high density of reservoir oil as well as poor development of fingers during injection due to high mobility ratios. In this study, results of ultrasound effect on the heavy oil recovery and its effect on the... 

Formation damage in oil and gas wells is mainly induced by drilling operations. Filtrate and particle invasion into formation as the sources of this damage caused serious problems, e.g. reduction of production rates. Therefore numerical modeling of this phenomenon helps us to better understand the process, and as a result, control and reduce formation damage associated with this impairment. In this research, a model to estimate the invasion depth and damage of mud filtrate from water-based mud is presented. Filtrate invasion into the formation is investigated by convection-diffusion equation with regard to dispersion term. The invasion depth is obtained from mud filtrate profile in the... 

Most of oil content, especially in Iran, has been reserved in fractured reservoirs, so study and modeling of production mechanism of these reservoirs are great of importance. Gravity drainage is one of these effective production mechanisms in fractured porous media which dynamic pore scale modeling of this mechanism will lead to better understanding of it. In this work, the effects of variety of parameters such as oil gravity, interfacial tension between oil and gas, pore and throat size distribution, fracture aperture, and block to block interaction (capillary continuity and reinfiltartion) have been investigated. So developed simulator in this work has two main and separated parts, which... 

Due to the fact that, over 60% of oil reserves are located in fractured reservoirs, this type of reservoirs requires a great deal of attention. The presence of the fractures in porous media results in many complexities in the liquid path and production, consequently, simulation and modeling of flow equations is highly important. In order to achieve a more profound understanding of liquid flow in gravity drainage mechanism, the concept of capillary tubes is initially used. By using the capillary tube concept, at first, the gravity drainage mechanism is investigated in the first block in a stack of blocks and an analytical solution is presented for this case. Then, the stack of blocks is... 

In this work, flow transport, distribution, and dissolution of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in heterogeneous porous media were modeled by focusing on the dissolution process in pore-level and field scale. First, by adopting advection-diffusion and mass transfer equations, dissolution process and NAPL distribution were investigated in a heterogeneous porous media using pore network modeling. The 2-D developed model was based on observations of micromodel tests. The pore scale simulator which adopted by this work was improved in some aspects in comparison to previous models in the literatures. First, in the phase displacement, by considering more realistic geometries for pore structure... 

Using foam for reducing undesirable effects of fingering and gravity segregation in enhanced oil recovery through gas injection has attracted a rapidly increasing interest in recent years. Lack of stability of foam often limits its application. However there is a lack of systematic study of effects of unmodified and in-situ modified silica nano-particle on foam stability and foam behavior in the presence and absence of oil and also polymer effects from the prospective of analysis of foam dynamic stability, size of foam bubbles, and foam flow behavior in Hele – Shaw cell. Main objectives of this study are mechanistic investigation of effects of polymer – surfactant systems and in-situ... 

Gas injection is one of the common methods for enhance oil recovery from oil reservoirs. At miscible injection condition, the efficiency of the process is majorly affected by the molecular diffusion coefficient of the gas in the oil. Therefore, the accurate value of this coefficient is an essential for applying in reservoir simulator. However, determination of this coefficient only is possible through experimental methods. In this study, pressure decay method was applied to determine the diffusion coefficient of nitrogen, methane and carbon dioxide gases in crude oil. The reasons for choosing this method are : accuracy in designing the experiment, covering a wide range of pressure... 

gas injection method is one of the common methods of EOR, which has a long history. In gas injection, molecular entry gas mixing is the controlling factor of oil play. Therefore, the exact value of this coefficient becomes an important requirement for the simulation and modeling of oil reservoirs, which can only be determined by laboratory consumption methods. In this research, the pressure decay method is used as a common laboratory method to determine the penetration coefficient of methane, nitrogen and gas enriched with intermediate compounds in crude oil of one of Iran's oil reservoirs. In most of the available records in the investigation of the mentioned gas diffusion coefficient in... 

Nowadays, due to limitation of production from conventional oil reservoirs, enhanced recovery from heavy oil reservoirs is of great concern. However, production from these energy resources is not a simple task and production using common technologies is not easily exploitable. Heterogeneous structure and also high surface tension between injected fluid and reservoir oil are of the main challenges during water flooding processes in heavy oil reservoirs. The high surface tension force causes a large part of the oil remains in the reservoir after the water flooding operation. One method for overcoming this problem is the use of surfactants that reduces capillary forces and consequently... 

This work concerns with experimental and modeling investigation of the asphaltene damage removal using ultrasonic wave irradiation. A specific core holder apparatus was designed and utilized for in situ ultrasonic exposure to damaged core plug at different conditions of exposure time, ultrasound power and distances between sound source and plug. Injection of many pore volumes of an asphaltenic crude oil was used for creating asphaltene induced damaged in porous media through permeability measurements. The deposited asphaltene during oil injection as well as asphaltene removal due to ultrasonic exposure was evaluated using IP-143 analysis. The results revealed that ultrasound application... 

In recent years, utilizing the colloidal gas aphron (CGA) drilling fluids is getting more and more commonplace due to their little formation damage and filtration loss. This study tries to investigate the effect of presence of nanoparticles and their type (hydrophobicity) on stability and performance of water and oil based CGA drilling fluids. This is done through analyzing stability, filtration, rheology, and pore blockage tests. Water and oil based CGA drilling fluids consisted of stabilizer, surfactant, and nanoparticles are generated and through examining of the effects of polymer, surfactant, and nanoparticle concentrations, the optimum formulation is obtained. High pressure-high... 

In this work a generalized non-equilibrium model of three-phase flow in porous media including gravity as well as capillary terms is developed and used for analysis of Riemann’s problem in several three-phase systems. The proposed model uses the extension of Barenblatt model to three-phase systems considering dynamic effects in both relative permeability and capillary pressure functions. We compare the solution of the Riemann’s problem when non-equilibrium effects are included. While equilibrium formulation develops unstable oscillatory solution in the elliptic region, non-equilibrium solution is smooth and stable. The proposed non-equilibrium model is validated by the experimental data of... 

Water coning is a complex phenomenon that depends on various parameters which include among: production rate, matrix and fracture permeability, perforation interval, aquifer size, mobility ratio, capillary pressure, etc. Production of water can greatly affect the productivity of a well and the reservoir at large volume. In naturally fractured reservoirs, this problem is more complex because permeability of the fractures in the porous media is too high. With this complexity of water coning behavior in naturally fractured reservoir, this phenomenon was studied by simulating a sector of a carbonate fractured reservoir supported by an aquifer using Eclipse-300 simulator. A sector of an Iranian... 

From previous years, water injection was considered as one of the most common methods for enhanced oil recovery. But recently much attention has been paid on the use of low salinity water (LSW) as an enhanced oil recovery fluid. The main mechanism that causes improve oil recovery is wettability alteration to a more water wet state. The change observed in recovery factor during LSW flooding induced from changes in relative permeability and capillary pressure when different levels of salinity are used. However, a few researchers tried to evaluate how macroscopic flow functions depend on the salinity of injected water. To this end, a series oil displacements by water performed on sandstone rock...