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Low salinity/smart waterflooding is simple to apply and a promising enhanced oil recovery method in which ion-tuned saltwater is injected into subsurface oil reservoirs. Many aspects of this operation, in particular those pertaining to nano-scale, are not yet fully understood. The present dissertation is an attempt to shed light on the microscopic properties and behavior of rock/brine/oil interfaces throughout low salinity/smart waterflooding. Several simulations were carried out for oil/brine and calcite/brine categories each containing various ions and hydrocarbons compounds. The surface contribution of non-functional oil compounds (aromatics and aliphatics) near brine medium was... 

Low salinity water flooding (LSWF) is one of the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods that can be applied in both secondary and tertiary recovery techniques. Some reports indicate no incremental oil recovery associated with this method, and the reason can be associated with the binary and tertiary interactions between oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems. In some OBRs, the initial conditions are not favourable in terms of initial wettability. One of the key factors is the local rock heterogeneities in permeability and mineralogy which can affect LSWF performance because the microscopic and macroscopic heterogeneities can impact the flow pattern of the injected water, oil displacement efficiency, and... 

As the reservoir matures, especially in fractured reservoirs, oil production is usually accompanied by the production of some unwanted water. Water production causes environmental problems and imposes high costs on the production system, including the cost of separating water and oil, corrosion of facility, and sometimes, leading to abandoning well. One way to solve this problem is to use gels as a blocking agent. Today, preformed particle gels are used as an alternative to in situ gels, which can solve some issues of in-situ gels, such as uncertainty in gelling time and penetration depth.This research comprises three main parts. In the first part, four samples of preformed particle gels... 

Low salinity water flooding (LSWF) as an efficient enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique is proved to affect both, fluid-fluid and rock-fluid interactions to potentially release the trapped oil from the porous rock. Despite more than one decade of extensive research works on the low salinity water effect (LSWE), there are still many parameters to be studied for very complex cases. Therefore, in the first part of the experimental study of the dissertation, a systematic investigation on the effect of the initial wetting state (water-wet or oil-wet) of pure calcite is conducted to study the importance of fluid/fluid and fluid/rock interactions for LSWE investigation. In the case of initially... 

Low salinity water injection is one of the new and important methods of enhancing oil recovery. Experimental studies show the fact that the change in water salinity affects the interfacial properties of water-oil (Fluid-fluid interactions) And the change in wettability that represents the porous media (Rock-fluid interactions) is effective for Oil-recovery. Recently, progress have been made in simulating the process of injecting low-salinity water into the field or core dimensions. However, the simulation of the low salinity water injection process has been much less studied considering the fluid / fluid and fluid / rock interactions at the pore scale. The purpose of this study is to... 

Low-salinity waterflooding (LSWF) is a promising EOR approach that decreases the oil-wetness of reservoir rocks, hence increasing the recovery factor. Despite the importance of the pore-geometry on the performance of LSWF, especially in 3D simulations being affected by corner-flow and roughness, it is not yet investigated, thus in this thesis we aim at studying the aforementioned effects on LSWF. According to the preceding studies, during the drainage phase, the brines in the corners of pores cannot be displaced by oil because of requiring very high capillary pressure; thereby rendering a mixed-wet system. Hence considering this type of wettability is necessary for two-phase flow...