Sharif Digital Repository

Many reservoir and production engineers face asphaltene precipitation as a major problem during miscible carbon dioxide flooding projects. Experimental studies regarding asphaltene precipitation are therefore employed to assist in selecting appropriate facilities and proper operation schemes. During this study, a series of high pressure, high temperature experiments are designed and performed to analyze asphaltene precipitation behavior of an Iranian light reservoir crude at reservoir conditions due to natural production and miscible CO2 gas injection. For both sets of experiments, two different temperature levels (including reservoir temperature) are selected to investigate the role of... 

Accurate prediction of the PVT properties of reservoir oil is of primary importance for improved oilfield development strategies. Experimental determination of these properties is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, new empirical models for universal reservoir oils have been developed as a function of commonly available field data. In this communication, more than 750 experimental data series were gathered from different geographical locations worldwide. Successive linear programming and generalized reduced gradient algorithm as two constrained multivariable search methods were incorporated for modeling and expediting the process of achieving a good feasible solution. Moreover,... 

Vapor liquid equilibrium (VLE) data has significant role in designing processes which include vapor and liquid in equilibrium. Since it is impractical to measure equilibrium data at any desired temperature and pressure, particularly near critical region, thermodynamic models based on equation of state (EOS) are usually used for VLE estimating. In recent years due to the development of numerical tools like artificial intelligence methods, VLE prediction has been find new alternatives. In the present study a novel method called Least-Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) used for predicting bubble/dew point pressures of binary mixtures containing carbon dioxide (CO 2) + cyclic compounds as... 

Bubble point pressure is a crucial PVT parameter of reservoir fluids, which has a significant effect on oil field development strategies, reservoir evaluation and production calculations. This communication presents a new mathematical model to calculate the saturation pressures of crude oils as a function of temperature, hydrocarbon and non-hydrocarbon reservoir fluid compositions, and characteristics of the heptane-plus fraction. The model was developed and tested using a total set of 130 experimentally measured compositions and saturation pressures of crude oil samples from different geographical locations covering wide ranges of crude oil properties and reservoir temperatures. In-depth... 

Precipitation, aggregation, and breakup of asphaltene particles are studied under natural depletion and nitrogen injection processes by means of high pressure filtration and a photographic procedure coupled with image analysis. Filtration results show that nitrogen destabilizes asphaltenes extremely, and the problem is more severe for heavier crude samples. Bimodal histograms of particle size distribution show two agglomeration mechanisms: cluster aggregation dominant around bubble point pressure and diffusion limited far away. The fractal structure of aggregates is also altered by gas injection; it is observed that the flocculent masses grow in size and become more compact and organized... 

Asphaltene precipitation and deposition within the reservoir formation is one of the main concerns during enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes especially during the gas injection. In the current study, different aspects of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) injection in the reservoir, was thoroughly examined. The feasibility of using these gases as the injection gas was explored using Bayesian network-based screening method. After recombination and preparation of the live crude oil, precipitation of asphaltene using vanishing interfacial tension (VIT) method and core flooding experimentation was examined. Besides, swelling test was utilized to investigate the effect of CO2 and N2... 

Particle size distribution (PSD) is an important factor that determines how asphaltene instability can damage porous media during natural depletion and enhanced oil recovery processes. In this work, aggregate size distribution under natural depletion and miscible nitrogen injection processes are determined via image analysis techniques and the results are modelled by population balance equation. Unimodal distribution curves in natural depletion show the dominance of particle-particle aggregation mechanism and the clustering is detected only around crude oil bubble point pressure. It is also observed that miscible nitrogen injection considerably increases the number and size of asphaltene... 

Ionic liquids are a significant type of organic salts with attractive and superior physicochemical features for employing in a number of chemical processes. Ionic liquids include one large and asymmetric cationic or anionic functional group. The properties of cationic functional group are almost similar and it is main motivation of this study. In the present investigation, we extended various semi-empirical correlations to predict some temperature-based properties of ionic liquids mixture (IL-mixture). These properties are density, viscosity, surface tension and bubble point pressure. In the case of IL-mixture density, modified Rackett equation and Taylor equation with three scenarios,...