Sharif Digital Repository

In this work effect of composition changes of injection gas, CH4 + CO2, on the performance of immiscible WAG injection in light oil, 41 oAPI, which has been rarely attended in the available literature is investigated. Presence of CO2 helps to reduce the MMP of CH4 significantly. Core flood experiments are conducted at reservoir conditions and fixed flow rate of 0.5cc/min on a sandstone sample with the brine concentration of 5000 ppm, and the influence of injection gas composition as well as WAG ratio on oil recovery is investigated. Different mole percents of methane in mixture, 0%, to 100% are examined, and the tests continued to ten alternate cycles with a slug size of 0.1 pore volumes and... 

Colloidal gas aphrons (CGAs) are progressive operational fluids used in different areas such as engineering fields due to their unique characteristics. In between, the application of nanoparticle in several fields of engineering has received considerable attention in recent years. However, little or no information is available regarding the application of nanoparticle in CGA suspensions. In this study, the size distribution of bubbles, stability, API filtrate and rheology of a new type of these fluids called nanoparticle-enhanced colloidal gas aphron (NCGA)-based fluids are investigated. NCGAs’ stability is studied by measuring drainage rate tests. Also, for the investigation of fluid flow... 

In recent years, polysilicon nanoparticles are used to enhance the oil recovery through the water injection process in oilfields. The contributing mechanisms are the reduction of interfacial tension and wettability alteration which lead to improving or decreasing the oil phase relative permeability and can be traced by change of relative permeability curves. However, profound understanding of the effect of dispersed nano-silica particles on the hysteretic behavior of relative permeability curves remains a controversy topic in the literature.The current study illustrates the influence of dispersed silica particles on hysteretic trend of two-phase curves of oil-water relative permeability.... 

Reliable relative permeability curves of oil-gas systems are important for successful simulation and modeling of gas injection, especially when the miscibility condition approaches. In this work, the relative permeability of a CO2-light oil system has been measured under different conditions, using the Civan and Donaldson (1989) [13] method. Dolomite and sandstone core samples were used in the experiments. The minimum miscibility pressure was calculated using an empirical correlation, as well as slim-tube simulation. Due to some controversial assumptions of the Civan and Donaldson method, such as immiscible and incompressible displacement, history matching was used for predicting the... 

Many heavy oil reservoirs contain discontinuous shales which act as barriers or baffles to flow. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding about how the shale geometrical characteristics affect the reservoir performance, especially during polymer flooding of heavy oils. In this study, a series of polymer injection processes have been performed on five-spot glass micromodels with different shale geometrical characteristics that are initially saturated with the heavy oil. The available geological characteristics from one of the Iranian oilfields were considered for the construction of the flow patterns by using a controlled-laser technology. Oil recoveries as a function of pore... 

The requirement of reliable relative permeability data is more intensified when the miscibility condition approaches. In this work the relative permeability of CO2 and oil has been measured at different miscibility conditions using conventional methods. Fractured dolomite and sandstone core plugs samples were used in the experiments. Due to some errorful assumptions of conventional methods such as immiscible, incompressible displacement, inverse modeling was used for predicting the reliable relative permeability of oil and gas phases at near miscible condition from measured oil production and pressure drop data. The initial guesses of relative permeabilities were provided from conventional... 

In this work the Fourier series and Zakian and Schapery methods are considered to numerically solve the Laplace transform of a pressure distribution equation for radial flow and to generate the type curves for three different boundary conditions. The results show that the Schapery method leads to approximate solutions for small values of dimensionless time. For large values, however, this method is almost accurate and hence is recommended because it is fast to apply compared to other algorithms. It has been found that the accuracy of the Schapery method for early time prediction can be improved to almost a perfect match with analytical results through multiplying the Schapery relation by a... 

Colloidal Gas Aphron (CGA) are finding increasing application in fields of science and engineering because of their distinctive characteristic. As interest in the application of CGA based fluids grows and in order to select the best procedure for using them in successful petroleum engineering operations, there is a need to gain a better understanding of the factors that affect their properties and behavior. This article discusses the rheological characterization, stability analysis and filtration properties of CGA based fluids for three bio-polymers and two ionic surfactant. The stability and filtration analysis were investigated with the static drain rate technique and API filtration tests,... 

Practical designs of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) remediation strategies require reliable modeling of interphase mass transfer to predict the retraction of NAPL during processes such as dissolution. In this work, the dissolution process of NAPL during two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media is studied using pore-network modeling and micromodel experiments. A new physical-experimental approach is proposed to enhance the prediction of the dissolution process during modeling of interphase mass transfer. In this regard, the normalized average resident solute concentration is evaluated for describing the dissolution process at pore-level. To incorporate the effect of medium... 

Water flooding is one of the most common enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods, however its application in naturally fractured reservoirs (NFR), suffers from the flow of water in high permeable channels and fractures which leads to low areal and volumetric sweep efficiency. Preformed Particle Gels (PPG), as a subset of gel treatments, can play a vital role in plugging super-permeable zones either near wellbore or deep in the reservoir. Nevertheless the mechanical strength and thermal stability of the designed PPGs, especially under harsh environmental conditions, are subject to further research and development. In spite of recent studies, the effects of nano-materials on the rheological and... 

The formation of liquid bridges can maintain capillary continuity between matrix blocks during gas/oil gravity drainage in fractured reservoirs. A travelling oil drop draining into a fracture either forms a liquid bridge or breaks into detached drops. However, the different characteristics of a travelling drop during its elongation and required conditions for transformation into a liquid bridge are not well described in the published literature. In this work, a one-dimensional model based on slender-drop theory is employed that holds gravity, viscosity, and surface tension forces but ignores inertia. This model, together with Young-Laplace equation, gives the fracture capillary pressure.... 

This paper proposes a hierarchical active power management strategy for a medium voltage (MV) islanded microgrid including a multihybrid power conversion system (MHPCS). To guarantee excellent power management, a modular power conversion system is realized by parallel connection of small MHPCS units. The hybrid system includes fuel cells (FC) as main and supercapacitors (SC) as complementary power sources. The SC energy storage compensates the slow transient response of the FC stack and supports the FC to meet the grid power demand. The proposed control strategy of the MHPCS comprises three control loops; dc-link voltage controller, power management controller, and load current sharing... 

Excess pressure drop induced by inertial effects limits the applicability of Darcy's law for modeling of fluid flow through porous media at high velocities. It is expected such additional pressure drop is influenced by pore/morphology of porous media. This work concerns with fundamental understanding of how throat curvature affects intrinsic properties of porous media at non-Darcy flow conditions using network modeling. Conical, parabolic, hyperbolic, and sinusoidal capillary ducts with three types of imposed anisotropy are used to construct the network in a more realistic manner. Solutions of one dimensional Navier-Stokes equation for incompressible fluid flow through converging/diverging... 

The network modeling approach is applied to provide a new insight into the onset of non-Darcy flow through porous media. The analytical solutions of one-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation in sinusoidal and conical converging/diverging throats are used to calculate the pressure drop/flow rate responses in the capillaries of the network. The analysis of flow in a single pore revealed that there are two different regions for the flow coefficient ratio as a function of the aspect ratio. It is found that the critical Reynolds number strongly depends on the pore geometrical properties including throat length, average aspect ratio, and average coordination number of the porous media, and an... 

Despite the numerous experimental studies, there is a lack of fundamental understanding about how the local and global heterogeneity control the efficiency of polymer flooding. In this work a series of water and polymer injection processes are performed on five-spot glass micromodels which are initially saturated with the crude oil at varying conditions of flow rate, water salinity, polymer type and concentration. Three different pore structures in combine with different layer orientations are considered for designing of five different micromodel patterns. It has been observed that the oil recovery of water flooding is increasing with the salinity concentration, for the ranges studied here.... 

This paper presents an effective hybrid optimal modulation technique for a cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverter. The introduced method is generalized optimal pulsewidth modulation, which can be extended to any m-level CHB multilevel inverter operating at any switching frequency. The presented hybrid optimal modulation strategy includes the pattern exchange and optimal modulation techniques. In the optimal modulation technique, the hybrid interior-point algorithm, which is more flexible and efficient than conventional optimization techniques, is applied. The proposed hybrid optimal modulation strategy yields balanced units' output fundamental voltages, and low total harmonic distortion... 

This paper proposes a control strategy for an islanded microgrid to effectively coordinate hybrid power source (HPS) units and to robustly control individual interfaced inverters under unbalanced and nonlinear load conditions. Cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverters are flexibly deployed in order to enhance the power quality and redundancy. The HPS employs fuel cell (FC) as the main and supercapacitors (SC) as complementary power sources. Fast transient response; high performance; and high power density are the main characteristics of the proposed HPS system. The presented control strategy consists of a power management strategy for the HPS units and a voltage control strategy for the... 

This paper depicts a new configuration for modular hybrid power conversion systems, namely, multi-hybrid generation system (MHGS), and parallel connection at the output, such that the converter of each unit shares the load current equally. This is a significant step towards realizing a modular power conversion system architecture, where smaller units can be connected in any series/parallel grouping to realize any required unit specifications. The supercapacitor (SC) as a complementary source is used to compensate for the slow transient response of the fuel cell (FC) as a main power source. It assists the FC to meet the grid power demand in order to achieve a better performance and dynamic... 

The main goal of a preformed particle gel (PPG) treatment is to prevent channeling of water, with the minimum formation damage to the oil productive zones. In our recent study we introduced Silicate sodium solution along with Graphene Nano-platelets (GNP) as new additives in PPG synthesis and it was confirmed that the SGN-PPG shows acceptable swelling performance along with better thermal stability and dehydration resistance compared to the base synthesized PPG. The aim of the present work is to investigate the rheological behaviors of swollen hydrogels. These dynamic tests confirmed superior rheological properties and higher gel strength for the new SGN-PPG compared to the base PPG without... 

Among different methods which are introduced to reduce unwanted water production, “Preformed Particle Gel” (PPG) is a recently developed type of these gels that can have important advantages such as temperature resistance and long-term stability. The aim of the present work is to synthesize a new type of PPG in which the above specifications are improved even further with the advantage of the Nano-material (here after called N-PPG) and then investigate its effectiveness via static bulk tests as well as dynamic Hele-Shaw and Micromodel tests. In static tube tests, the swelling performance of N-PPG samples was evaluated under different conditions. The examined parameters include various pH of...