Sharif Digital Repository

In this research the experimental and theoretical studies on different Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques, i.e. Water Flooding (WF), Gas Injection (GI) and Water Alternating Gas process (WAG) were performed on specimens taken from an Iranian carbonate offshore reservoir at the reservoir condition. The experimental results for each specified techniques were compared with the corresponding results obtained from a simulation model. In the case of WF and GI, the injection rates were set to be 0.1, 0.2 and 0.5 cc/min while for the WAG experiments, with two WAG ratios 1 and 2 and with 7, 7, and 10 cycles, the injection rates were 0.1, 0.2 and 0.5 cc/min. The results obtained from the... 

Understanding the behavior and estimating the magnitude of floods with specific recurrence intervals are important tasks for various applications such as flood protection strategies. Fractal analysis has proven useful in characterization of flood frequency behavior. We employ a systematic fractal approach which enables dividing streamflow data into different behavior regimes and, in particular, identifying flood regimes. Since seasonality is a key factor in flood-formation scenarios, we incorporate this concept in our analysis through generating two separate streamflow data sets for summer and winter, and next performing associated fractal analysis on each. To illustrate our approach and see... 

For the first time, Dysprosium was extracted by the novel method of emulsion liquid membrane in a pulsed packed column in a continuous process. Emulsion liquid membrane (ELM) was comprised of D2EHPA (di-2-ethylhexylphosphoric acid) as carrier and Span 80 (Polysorbate 80) as the surfactant in kerosene as the diluent and nitric acid as internal phase. In this work, the packed column was characterized from a hydrodynamic point of view including flooding condition and holdup at flooding points. Operational parameters affecting the flooding points, such as pulsation intensity and flow rate of continuous and dispersed phases have been studied. It was found that increase in pulsation intensity up... 

The main purposes of this study were to scrutinize experimentally effects of polymer and rock types on the oil recovery using water and polymer flooding processes. Four dynamic flooding experiments were carried out at simulated reservoir condition of temperature and pressure. According to the obtained results, the ultimate oil recovery by water flooding in highly fractured reservoirs was less than reservoirs with the microfractures. The results of polymer flooding showed that in addition the polymer molecular weight, the sulfonation of polymers also affects the oil recovery  

Due to role of polymer in increasing sweep efficiency during oil recovery, much attention has been paid to the using polymer solutions in enhanced oil recovery methods. In spite of the existence of the great researches in this area, the role of nanoparticles in modification of the polymer performance in the presence of salts has not been examined before. Furthermore, there is no information about how the dispersed silica nanoparticles affect the heavy oil recovery during the polymer flooding in the presence of divalent cations. In this study, a series of polymer flooding experiments are performed in a quarter five-spot glass micromodel saturated with heavy oil. Solutions of polyacrylamide... 

Alkaline flooding is one of the newest chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods. Alkaline generates in situ surfactants when in reacts with acid content of the oil. This economic surfactant generated in oil-water interface, reduces interfacial tension (IFT) significantly that leads to increase in oil recovery by extracting oil from tiny pores. In this study, three alkaline i.e. Na2CO3, NaOH and KOH in various concentrations were flooded in a glassy micromodel to detect displacement mechanisms and compare oil recovery. According to the results, increase in alkaline concentration leads to increase in recovery. However, in this case, alkaline type does not play a significant role. In... 

This study is an attempt to investigate and analyze uncertainty through the Glue method in parts of Tabriz, Iran, using the SWMM urban flood model. In order to quantify the uncertainty, the initial range of input parameters including curve number, impenetrability percentage, penetrability level’s coarseness coefficient, and impenetrability level’s coarseness coefficient are defined and the GLUE algorithm is used to conduct primary sampling operation from parametric space using Latin hypercube sampling method. Considering the simulation results and the observed values of synchronized events, about %20 of the total outputs and generated parameters series have been excluded as acceptable... 

Alkaline-Surfactant-Polymer flooding is one of the most novel chemical enhanced oil recovery methods in the petroleum industry. This method has attracted interest due to its remarkable advantages. In this work, a series of ASP floods are conducted on fractured/non-fractured carbonate rocks. The performance of the tests was investigated by various ASP floods consisting of five types of polymers, two surfactants and one common alkaline. ASP was flooded simultaneously and sequentially in four defined scenarios after water flooding. The results showed that although using hydrolysed polymers increases the recovery factor in the fractured medium, sulfonated polymers increase oil recovery even more... 

Although Alkaline-Surfactant-Polymer (ASP) flooding is proved to be efficient for heavy oil recovery, the displacement mechanisms/efficiency of this process should be discussed further in fractured porous media especially in typical waterflood geometrical configurations such as five-spot injection-production pattern. In this study, several ASP flooding tests were conducted in fractured glass-etched micromodels which were initially saturated with heavy oil. The ASP flooding tests were conducted at constant injection flow rates and different fracture geometrical characteristics were used. The ASP solutions constituted of five polymers, two surfactants and three alkaline types. The results... 

Although alkaline-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding has proven efficient for heavy oil recovery, the displacement mechanisms and efficiency of this process should be discussed further in fractured porous media. In this study, several ASP flooding tests were conducted in fractured glass-etched micromodels with a typical waterflood geometrical configuration, i.e. five-spot injection-production pattern. The ASP flooding tests were conducted at constant injection flow rates but different fracture geometrical characteristics. The ASP solutions consisted of five polymers, two surfactants, and three alkaline types. It was found that using synthetic polymers, especially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide... 

In this study, a coupling of a hydrologic and hydraulic model was utilized to assess the impacts of river geometry data resolution on the flood inundation characteristics in a data-scarce environment. Hydrological modeling incorporates soil conservation service curve-number (SCS-CN) and the geomorphologic based instantaneous unit hydrograph model (GIUH) to compute the direct runoff hydrograph in Kashkan river basin located in western Iran. 1D HEC-Geo-RAS model was used and performed to simulate inundation extent of 100-yr floods (~1800 m3/s) along 40 km reach of Kashkan river with a ground survey of river cross-section (2000 cross-sections, each including 500 data-points). The effect of... 

Although most heavy oil reservoirs contain discontinuous shaly structures, there is a lack of fundamental understanding how the shaly structures affect the oil recovery efficiency, especially during surfactant flooding to heavy oils. Here, an experimental study was conducted to examine the effect of discontinuous shales on performance of surfactant flooding by introducing heterogeneities to represent streaks of shale in five-spot glass micromodels. Results show that oil recovery in presence of shale streak is lower than in its absence. Based on the authors' observations, the presence of flow barriers causes premature breakthrough of injected fluids and also an unstable displacement front. As... 

The diffusion and deposition of TiO2 nanoparticles in EOR application was investigated in this paper. TEM image of nanoparticles showed that the particles are elongated with average long and short axis sizes of 54 and 15 nm. Water flooding tests showed that the recovery factor can be improved from 49% to 80% using TiO2 nanoparticles. Viscosity and interfacial tension measurements showed that by using TiO2 nanoparticles the viscosity of injected fluid and interfacial tension do not change significantly and can not explain the change in recovery factor. Contact angle measurements showed that nanoparticles deposition changed the wettability of the rock surface from oil-wet to water-wet. SEM... 

This paper studies a WAG process for improving the recovery efficiency in light oil reservoirs. Until now, few references have reported the role of CO2 mole percent on recovery improvement in light oil reservoirs. The injected gas was changed, and the effect of composition changes on performance of core flood experiments were conducted at fixed flow rate. Five series of experiments (varied in methane mole percentages, 0, 25, 50, and 75, 100) were systematically examined. The results indicated that the oil recovery efficiency improved with the increasing of CO2 mole ratio and there was also maximum recovery efficiency in this work. That would be helpful to better understanding the role of CO2... 

This paper concerns on experimental investigation of biopolymer/polymer flooding in fractured five-spot systems. In this study, a series of polymer injection processes were performed on five-spot glass type micromodels saturated with heavy crude oil. Seven fractured glass type micromodels were used to illustrate the effects of polymer type/concentration on oil recovery efficiency in presence of fractures with different geometrical properties (i.e., fractures orientation, length and number of fractures). Four synthetic polymers as well as a biopolymer at different levels of concentration were tested. Also a micromodel constituted from dead-end pores with various geometrical properties was... 

In this paper, we derive the rate of route discovery process for finding a randomly chosen destination in large wireless networks. The well-known protocol for route discovery is flooding in which each node simply rebroadcasts the route request packet once. Rate of route discovery process is defined as the inverse of time between transmitting two successive route request packets which shows how fast a node can request a route to its destination. Discovery time is another parameter of interest. For a single node discovering routes to its destination, at most the rate of Eθ (1/3√n) is feasible when n identical nodes are optimally placed in network area and the discovery time is of order... 

Highlights: The objective of this work is to investigate the effects of the surfactants on the oil extraction from the dead ends through the numerical simulations and experimental evidences. The volume of fluid approach in the frame of the finite volume method has been used for numerical simulations in 2-D domain and experimental flooding tests have been done using a glassy micro-model. The effects of the water-oil, water-wall and oil-wall interfacial tensions have been investigated numerically and some results are compared to experimental flooding results. Simulations have been done in the cases of water-wet, neutralized-wet and oil-wet micro-models also. The numerical results show that in... 

Phase behavior of active crude oil/alkaline was systematically studied in the presence of cosolvents. For this purpose, several factors have been considered: alkaline concentration, oil concentration, and type of brine. The best composition was used to generate emulsion for rheology and displacement tests. Furthermore, precipitation of alkaline was eliminated by its synergy with EDTA. Next, rheology of emulsion was analyzed by which a Power law model was developed that indicates non-Newtonian behavior of emulsion. Moreover, the viscosity of emulsion was reduced by the addition of cosolvent as well as by the increase of alkaline concentration. Finally, the best formulation (containing... 

Advanced reservoir characterization methods can yield geological models at a very fine resolution, containing 1011–1018 cells, while the common reservoir simulators can only handle much lower numbers of cells due to computer hardware limitations. The process of coarsening a fine-scale model to a simulation model is known as upscaling. Predicting the accuracy of simulation results over an upscaled grid with respect to the fine grid is highly important, as it can yield the optimum upscaling process. In this paper, permeability-based and velocity-based a priori error estimation techniques are proposed by introducing image processing-based comparison methods in the context of upscaling. The... 

In the present study, we try to numerically simulate the nanofluid flooding method, which is one of the newest methods in this field. For this purpose, the nanofluid is considered as a single phase fluid that enters the porous petroleum reservoir containing oil. Since all porous petroleum reservoirs are heterogeneous, the porous grid is also considered heterogeneous and is solved using the finite element numerical method. The geometry considered in this study is a two-dimensional anticline medium that is heterogeneous. In this study, the effect of using different volume fractions of nanoparticles in nanofluid is studied. Capillary pressure or diffusion are considered in simulation and their...