In the current investigation, the solubility of fenoprofen as a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug in supercritical CO2 (SC-CO2) is measured by employing a motorized PVT (pressure–volume–temperature) equilibrium cell. The solubility measurements were carried out in temperatures between 308 and 338 K and pressures between 12 and 40 MPa. The measured data reveals that the solubility of fenoprofen (mole fraction) lies between 2.01 × 10–5 and 4.20 × 10–3, depending on the thermodynamic conditions. Besides the experimental measurement of fenoprofen solubility, thermodynamic modeling of solubility using five different density-based semi-empirical correlations was carried out. The models were considered with only three fitting parameters, namely, Mendez-Santiago and Teja (MST), Bartle et al., Kumar and Johnston (K–J), Chrastil, and Garlapati and Madras models. The results revealed that among the examined models, the Bartle et al. model was the most accurate one with the lowest average absolute relative deviation percent (AARD %) of 6.58% for the studied drug, while the K–J model leads to poor prediction with an AARD % of 9.60%.

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Carbonated water (CW) and low salinity (LS) injection processes are among the most widely investigated method during the past decade due to their unique advantages. Although the results revealed rather efficiency of these two methods, it is reported that using the combination of these two methods can introduce new insight about the smart and newly developed enhance oil recovery processes. Respect to these facts, the current work is aimed to investigate the swelling behavior of heavy crude oil in carbonated water at the presence of Na2SO4 and Mg2SO4. In this way, one of the main effective mechanisms through the carbonated water injection which is swelling factor is examined in the presence of two different salts, namely, Na2SO4 and Mg2SO4, under different pressures (500–4000 psi) and temperatures (30–80 °C). The results obtained in this investigation are compared with the previously reported results regarding the carbonated brine (CB) solutions consisted of different salts such as KCl, NaCl, CaCl2, and MgCl2 with the same concentration of 15,000 ppm. The results not only reveal the possible mechanism behind the swelling factor variation, but also reveal that crude oil and ion type as well as temperature besides the solubility of CO2 in aqueous phase can introduce tremendous influence on the mobility of CO2 molecules and their partitioning from aqueous phase towards the oil phase. Also, the obtained results reveal that the presence of divalent ions can directly affect the crossover pressure toward lower values.

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