Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

Matrix acidizing aims at bypassing near wellbore damages in typical carbonate reservoirs or enhancing permeability and hydraulic conductivity in naturally fracture ones. The simulation of acidizing process at pore scale and complex geometries by LBM will lead to gain more knowledge about molecular mechanisms that govern rock dissolution, diffusion and advection of reactive fluid and help the evaluation of acidizing efficiency.In this thesis, simulation of acidizing includes the following steps:
• Multicomponent fluid convection
• Fluid diffusion into the solid
• Fluid-rock reaction
• Boundary conditions including periodic, bounceback, non-equilibrium bounceback, Dirichlet,... 

Oil composition plays an undeniable role on the low salinity water flooding (LSWF) efficiency. This property directly affects the kinetics of wettability alteration through electrostatic interactions and interfacial tension (IFT). For instance, mixing in stagnant zones through a thin water film is considered as one of the most important diffusion controlled phenomenon which is goverened by Non-Fickian solute transport model. The major two potentials controlling the solute transport in thin film are salinity gradient and electrostatic potentials, which can be affected by oil composition and surface charges. This study aims to investigate the effect of oil composition on low salinity... 

Acidizing as the most frequent stimulation technique in the field, has been extensively used to increase the production rate. Even though acidizing treatments is well established, there is still an inherent risk for self-induced formation damage through incompatibilities of the fluids involved in this process.
A main potential problem during acidizing is the incompatibility of the acid and the reservoir’s crude oil. Acid interaction with crude oil can produce two major damage mechanisms that could offset partially, if not totally the benefit of the acid stimulation. These mechanisms are the rigid film emulsion formation and the acid-sludge precipitation, result in well productivity... 

The study of porous media, especially in pore-scales (micro and nano scales), is of particular importance in various sciences such as petroleum engineering, chemical, and civil engineering. Determine the physics of the pore scale to understand it better, identify the conditions for it to enforce the laws better, and explain some of the phenomena unknown so far, and finally obtain the parameters performed in the laboratory for specific samples are the main goals of these studies. One of the most well-known methods for analyzing porous media is pore network modeling. These models are always affected by the macroscopic structure of porous media, such as their multiscale state. In this study, an... 

Study of two-phase flowin porous media forms a basis for investigating various fluid systemsin the nature and industries. In recent years, more and more researchers use pore-scale mod-els to explore various physical phenomena occurring in complex media such as hydrocarbonreservoirs. After solving the flow equations in pore-scale, this approach can be utilized tocalculate some macroscopic values using particular forms of averaged flow field.In this research, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is used to simulate two-phaseflow in pore spaces of two- and three-dimensional porous media. The SPH method is a La-grangian meshless method that is suitable for flows with free surfaces, deformable... 

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... 

Considering the wide range of applications of porous media for heat transfer enhancement in various components of industrial machineries, including solar collectors, air dryers, compact heat exchangers, electronic microchips, investigation of heat transfer characteristics in porous media has been a major concern for many researchers. On the other hand, precise understanding of the physics of porous media-flow interaction has been an open research topic for a long time. The present research however, has aimed at developing a computational method to simulate the interaction between fluid flow and porous media to investigate heat transfer from prously covered surfaces. Pore scale modeling of... 

In this work, a pore-scale analysis of nonaqueous phase liquid (NAPL) flow, transport, dissolution, and mobilization in heterogeneous and homogeneous porous media was presented. First, dissolution processes and distribution of NAPL phase were investigated using micromodel experiments. The tests were conducted at different injection rates in NAPL-saturated porous media using distilled water, surfactant, and nanoparticles-assisted surfactant. Changes in residual NAPL volume and interfacial area were measured using image analysis method to calculate the mass transfer coefficient, k, and the lumped mass transfer rate coefficient, K. Based on the experimental results, empirical Sherwood... 

In recent years, application of porous media is highlighted among researchers due to their wider use in micro-scale problems, such as in gas reservoirs, micro-filtering, and heat exchangers. In such applications, accurate description of flow behavior, using governing equations based on continuum assumption, is not valid, since mean free path has the same order as the characteristic length of the problem. In such cases, imposing appropriate slip condition on the fluid-solid interface of porous media (in pore-scale level), based on kinetics theory, is an appropriate approach. For this purpose, pore-scale simulation of flow inside porous media in slippery and transient regimes is carried out... 

During all operations in oil and gas reservoirs, it is possible to cause formation damage. These damages can greatly reduce the rate of production. One of the major damages that can seriously affect the performance of a reservoir is the damage caused by drilling fluid. The main purpose of this thesis is to study the main mechanisms of formation damage caused by water-based drilling fluid using a glass micromodel for the first time. An accurate understanding of the mechanisms of formation damage can provide a good understanding of the selection of the type and concentration of materials used, as well as appropriate methods to control and eliminate damages. for controlling the drilling fluid... 

Enhancing oil production from fractured reservoirs is challenging. The flow characteristics observed in naturally fractured reservoirs are complicated due to interaction between the two different flow domains: fracture and matrix. Spontaneous imbibition is one of the most important recovery processes in water-wet fractured reservoirs. Oil cannot be spontaneously produced from oil-wet rocks, unless the capillary pressure barrier between fracture conduits and matrix is overcome. The flow characteristics in fractured systems thus relate to the wettability of the rocks. Low salinity water injection has been widely studied as a method of enhancing oil recovery in recent years. However, its impact... 

Formation damage in petroleum engineering is an important and fundamental phenomenon. During drilling operation, penetration of either the solid phase of drilling fluid or the base-fluid into the porous medium, reduces the permeability of the formation. While most experiments in the literature have focused on core-scale and beyond, there is lack of pore-scale studies. Moreover, presence of fractures has an undeniable effect on the extent of formation damage. Thus, the main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of fractures on the severity of formation damage caused by the water-based drilling fluid and the mechanisms of formation damage at the pore scale, using glass... 

The Low salinity water flooding is one of the important methods of secondary and tertiary oil production in which many expert petroleum-production engineering working on it in recent two decades. There are some basis mechanisms for low salinity method presented in the literatures including fine migrations, alkaline flooding, multicomponent ionic exchange, electrical double-layer expansion and pH-driven wettability alteration. The main approach is generating low salinity mechanism especially wettability alteration in OpenPNM framework. OpenPNM is a python base framework developed by Jeff Gostick for porous media modeling. OpenPNM has paved the way for extracting pore network models (PNM) from... 

Injection of acid into the carbonate rock dissolves the rock, and the porous medium is constantly changing. As a result, the boundaries between the acid and the porous medium, which are in fact the interface between the solid phase and the liquid phase, are constantly changing. Therefore, on the issue of acid injection into carbonate rock, we are facing dynamic boundary conditions. Also, due to the simultaneous solution of transfer and reaction phenomena, modeling acid injection into carbonate rock faces many challenges.In such problems, the ALE method, which is a combination of the best features of the Lagrangian method and the Eulerian method, offers a very precise solution and is used as... 

Formation damage is one of the most important challneges in hydrocarbon production; drilling mud invasion is one of its common types. This damage is caused by the penetration of the drilling fluid into the porous media, which its filtrate and solid pareticles block the pores and cause permeability reduction. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the pore-scale mechanisms of the formation damage induced by invert-emulsion drilling fluid and to investigate the effect of adding nanoparticles to the drilling fluid on the severity of the damage using microfluidic technique. According to the latest published articles, there has not been any research conducted at the pore-scale with... 

Carbonate reservoir acidizing is one of the most important well stimulation operations that has been widely used in recent years. Modeling the operation prior to any laboratory tests has always been one of the motivations of scientists in recent years due to the complexity of modeling to consider both mass transfer and reaction phenomena. There are several models have been proposed to simulate the acid injection process in carbonate rocks in recent years, the most important one is the Two-Scale Continuum Model (TSCM). This model utilizes the combination of Darcy-scale transfer and reaction equations and a series of pore scale relations to investigate acid injection into two-dimensional... 

Recent studies have shown that the injection of low-salinity water would enhance the oil recovery factor for both the core scale and the field test. The evidence obtained from laboratory studies showed that the control of salinity and the composition of injected water has successfully affected the oil release, hence enhancing the oil recovery efficiency. In this method, by changing the type and amount of dissolved ions in the injected water, the water/oil/rock interactions are altered. Based on this, extensive studies have been focused on the mechanisms for the trapped oil release at the pore scale. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, which can be divided... 

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... 

Mass or large-scale storage of hydrogen, as a clean source of energy, should be conducted in underground formations in order to be used as a reliable energy source at the peak of consumption. In this regard, underground formations such as aquifers and depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs are the most favorable and secured media for hydrogen storage. However, detailed understanding of the flow dynamics of hydrogen-water in these media is critical to maximize hydrogen storage and recovery and tackle the existing uncertainities which exist in the flow functions. To fill this gap, this research aims at a detailed pore-scale investigation of the effect of flow regime, hydrogen compressibility, and...