Sharif Digital Repository

Fractured carbonate reservoirs are mostly oil-wet to intermediate-wet. Due to the negative capillary pressure of the matrix poor spontaneous imbibition of reservoir brine occurs in such reservoirs, and water flooding leads into early break through due to the high conductivity of the fracture network. Some surfactants have the ability to change the wettability of rock matrix toward water-wet state by adsorbing onto the rock surface. The phenomenon can result in spontaneous imbibition improvement and thereby increasing water flooding efficiency and recovery from fractured carbonate reservoirs. In this thesis the effect of some surfactants on the wettability of Iranian carbonate reservoir rocks... 

A biocompatible ferrofluid have been prepared by co-precipitation of FeCl2.4H2O and FeCl3.6H2O under ultrasonic irradiation and with NaOH as alkaline agent. Also cystein was used as capping agent in the solution. Magnetic properties of the produced ferrofluid then determined by VSM test and magnetite nanoparticles were characterized by XRD and TEM techniques. Results indicate the presence of a biocompatible superparamagnetic ferrofluid including magnetite nanoparticles with particle size ranging under 15 nm. The effect of ultrasonic irradiation on presence of a sharp particle size distribution then denoted by comparing the condition with production without ultrasonic irradiation  

The phenomenon of oil drop detachment from solid surface has great importance in many different industries, such as coating, print, membrane emulsification, detergency, and oil enhancement recovery. In our study, we tried to explore this phenomenon. Therefore, we attempted to employ Young equation as force balance for the discussed system which is comprised of n-Decane as oil droplet, aqueous solution (brine) with SDS (Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate), and glass. Also, in order to find governing factors regarding oil detachment process -such as interfacial tension, contact angle, and line friction coefficient- we used an advanced apparatus equipped with horizontal microscope and digital video camera.... 

Naturally fractured oil reservoirs represent over 20% of the world's oil reserves, while over 60% of the world’s remaining oil lies trapped in fractured reservoirs. However, relatively little success has been achieved in increasing oil production from these complex reservoirs. Water flooding process leaves much oil in the reservoir, especially in fractured reservoirs. Surfactant flooding is known to lower the interfacial tension and hence, reduces capillary forces responsible for trapping oil and increasing recovery. However, fundamental understanding how the fracture geometrical properties affect the oil recovery efficiency during surfactant flooding remains a topic of debate in the... 

Nowadays, due to limitation of production from conventional oil reservoirs, enhanced recovery from heavy oil reservoirs are of great concern. In heavy oil reservoirs, only 5% of initial oil in place (IOIP) is producible due to high viscosity. Water flooding increases oil recovery just up to 10% which is due to improper mobility ratio. One of popular methods for increasing oil recovery is injection of chemical materials. Chemical methods are used in reservoirs that have high degree of heterogeneity like heterogeneous and layered reservoirs. These heterogeneities cause diversion and loss of injected water which leads to remaining of oil in its place. Using surface active agents, as a popular... 

In the modern societies, wastewater treatment is essential in achieving high level of standard in environmental protection and disposal. Recently, many researches are performed to study the surfactants’ biological decomposition in wastewater treatment process. In this project, fixed bed aerobic reactors are used in order to remove surfactant from wastewater. Integrated fixed film activation sludge reactor (IFAS) is used to remove surfactants and organic matters. It also used to study the capability of micro organisms in organic load removal in fixed bed biofilm for biological treatment of industrial wastewater. Pumice stone were used as the support in the reactor. The pumice stone is a... 

The aim of this research is to study the effect of surfactant type and the concentration reactants on the size, shape and magnetic properties of iron-gold core-shell magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) useable for biomedical application. The reverse micelle procedure was employed to synthesize iron NPs using two surfactants of CTAB and SDS. A gold shell with a thickness in the range of 10 to 40 nm was induced by reverse micelle method in order to prevent oxidation of the iron core. The size and morphology of NPs were studied by transition electron microscopy (TEM). It was found that the size of NPs increases by the increasing the reactants concentration while the morphology of the NPs was not... 

Today, due to limited number of light oil reservoirs, enhanced recovery from heavy oil reservoirs is taken into consideration. During the early production from heavy oil reservoirs, due to high viscosity, only a small amount (about 5%) of the oil can be produced; also after water injection operation due to unfavorable mobility ratio of water and oil, sorely more than about 10% of the original oil can be produced. On the other hand, fractured reservoirs represent about 20% of the world's oil reserves, while over 60% of the world's remaining oil reserves are in fractured reservoirs. Water flooding process leaves very high amounts of oil as remaining oil in these reservoirs too. One of the... 

Application of nanotechnology in the field of heat transfer has increased recently. The need to increase heat transfer rate yet decrease the size of cooling equipment, brought about lots of attention to thermal properties of Nanofluids. Nanofluid is the suspension of nanometer-sized solid particles in base liquid. Research on convective heat transfer of nanofluids which is only two decades old, shows great potential in increasing heat transfer rate. Although there is a remarkable research on thermal conductivity of Nanofluids, negligible research was conducted on combined Nanofluids . Developed Theory for thermal conductivity of combined nanofluid can be used to modeling the thermal... 

Understanding the properties of crude oil and the phenomena arising from this precious matter has always been of considerable importance. One of these important phenomena is emulsion, which is well-known in a great number of crude oil-related processes such as drilling, well completion, production, transportation and even the processing units in the refinery. One of the most important properties of crude oils and their emulsions is their flow or in other words their rheology. Therefore, in this project has also been tried to investigate the rheological behavior of crude oil and water in crude oil emulsion, experimentally and theoretically. The experiments were carried out using two crude... 

Always, understanding the properties of crude oil and related phenomena of that has been noticeable matter. Surface tension is one of the important fluid properties and the evaluation of that is essential in oil industry especially in enhanced oil recovery method (EOR) and transport of crude oil by using emulsions.
In this research, interfacial tension (IFT) was measured via pendant drop method. The effect of three parameters was investigated on IFT for creating of stable oil/water emulsion. These parameters were temperature, concentration of surfactants, and salinity. They were varied between 25-65 ᵒC, 0.05-0.2 gr and 5000ppm respectively. It was used two types of surfactant; acid... 

One of the suitable methods in EOR processes is miscible and immiscible gas injection. By gas injection, it is possible to replace all the oil, which is in contact with the gas. However, reservoir heterogeneity, low density, and low viscosity of gas result in problems such as gravity segregation, and fingering and consequently the gas reach the production well without any significant contact with reservoir oil. A way to deal with this problem is gas injection in the form of foam. In fact, gas injection in this manner increases the oil production by decreasing gas mobility and the negative effects of reservoir heterogeneity on gas displacement. Foam stability has a key role on the efficiency... 

Chemical flooding such as surfactant flooding in oil reservoirs can change the wettability and interfacial tension between oil and water and so reduce the residual oil saturation in the reservoir. Some of these materials can be adsorbed a lot on the surface of carbonate rocks, so it is difficult to predict the oil recovery factor in such process. Therefore it is necessary to survey the adsorption amount of surfactants in chemical EOR injections.In this thesis, the adsorption of a nonionic surfactant on the surface of carbonate rock is experimented and the proper model is obtained. Then the surfactant is injected in a core saturated with oil to observe the efficiency of this surfactant in... 

Asphaltine particle precipitation may lead to serious problems in petroleum industry; including wellbore transmissibility reduction. One of the proposed remedial methods is to make a use of the microorganisms which are able to consume the heavy hydrocarbon chains.
Hydrophobicity of a cell surface is one of the parameters which greatly affect the microorganism adhesion to water insoluble hydrocarbons, in which results a higher hydrocarbon biodegradation. Consequently as the hydrophobicity of a cell surface increases; the microorganism tendency to bond with the hydrocarbon molecule enhances. The presence of a surface active agent, as an instance a chemical surfactant, will affect the... 

Solvent-solvent and solute-solvent interactions were investigated in mixtures of Triton X-100 with water, methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol, tetrahydrofuran and butyl acetate. Solvatochromic parameters, including normalized polarity (E_T^N), dipolarity-polarizability (), hydrogen-bond donar (), and hydrogen-bond acceptor () abilities, were determined in these mixtures. We observed similar behavior for E_T^N and  in TX-100/alcohols mixtures. Parameters confirmed the preferential solvation in mixtures of surfactant and solvents.
Experimental data were handled in preferential solvation model. Six binary systems exhibit a complex behavior for all three indicators. It was shown that... 

One of the most important EOR methods in oil reservoirs is surfactant and polymer flooding. Surfactants cause decreasing in interfacial tension between oleic and aqueous phases. However, polymers give us efficient mobility control in displacing oil by increasing the viscosity of aqueous phase. Therefore, oil is displaced in aqueous phase by viscous forces.
One of the most important challenges in surfactant flooding is adsorption. The net surface charge distributed on the rock surface depends strongly on pH. When we inject surfactant in reservoir, electrostatic charge on rock surface causes the first-layer adsorption. After that we have had second-layer adsorption.
In this thesis we... 

Imbibition process is known to be an important recovery mechanism in naturally fractured reservoirs with water-wet matrix blocks that are imposed to water influx from an active aquifer or water flooding. Matrix blocks which are subjected to water flooding or water invasion from active aquifers do not become immersed in water at once, but they experience gradual rising of water in fracture. But most of imbibition studies are performed under conditions of totally immersed cores in static aqueous phase. Surfactants are known to reduce residual oil saturation by decreasing interfacial tension (IFT) between oil and water. On the other hand, considerable reduction of IFT due to surfactant... 

In the past years, upstream processes have been receiving a considerable R&D investment and commercial attention. The downstream processes have, however, been overlooked causing a production bottleneck that is shifting the costs of production from up to downstream. The need to develop more efficient and cost-effective separation and purification processes is, thus, crucial in order to improve process efficiency and economics keeping the required high standards of quality for market approval. In this research, promising aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS) containing Tween 20 as a quite biocompatible non-ionic surfactant and different salts (K3Citrate and NaH2PO4) were prepared and their... 

In this study, low-cost and simple method of precipitation or reactive crystallization was used to synthesize nanoparticles of silver iodide. For this purpose, the reaction of silver nitrate and potassium iodide along with several surfactants in a rotating disk reactor at ambient temperature and pressure was applied. In addition, the effects of hydrodynamic conditions such as diameter and rotating speed of the disk, feed flow rate, and feed injection location, with some of the effective kinetic parameters in the synthesis such as the concentration of the reactants, type and concentration of the surfactants and free ion ratio and aging time of solutions using dynamic light scattering analysis... 

Foam injection for enhanced oil recovery is concerned by petroleum engineers because it decreases adverse effects of fingering and gravity segregation caused by the injected fluid .Obviously foam stability is an important factor in the efficiency of this process. So investigating it is an imperative. One of the ways that less studied and can improve foam stability is using of nanoparticles. In this project effect of nanoparticles on foam stability and displacement mechanism during foam flooding has been discussed.
Study consisted of two sets of experiments. In the first part, the static foam stability in the presence of silica nanoparticles has been investigated. Also influence of...