A relative permeability model to derive fractional-flow functions of water-alternating-gas and surfactant-alternating-gas foam core-floods

Al-Mossawy, Mohammed Idrees; Demiral, Birol; Raja, D M Anwar

doi:10.1088/1742-2132/10/2/025010

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…There exist two flow regimes in the strong-foam state itself dominated by different mechanisms (Osterloh and Jante Jr. 1992;Cheng et al 2000). In the so-called high-quality regime with relatively high gas fractional flow and low water saturation, the stability of foam lamellae is dominated by capillary-suction coalescence (Alvarez et al 2001); in the low-quality regime with relatively low gas fractional flow and high water saturation, foam mobility is controlled by bubble trapping and mobilization (Rossen and Wang 1999). The pressure gradient reaches a maximum at the boundary of the high-quality regime and the low-quality regime in a set of foam experiments with a fixed total flow rate and a variety of foam qualities.…”

Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The pressure gradient reaches a maximum at the boundary of the high-quality regime and the low-quality regime in a set of foam experiments with a fixed total flow rate and a variety of foam qualities. The foam quality corresponding to this maximum pressure gradient is known as the transition foam quality ( f Ã g ), which varies with surfactant formulation and concentration, rock permeability and heterogeneity, and overall flow rates (Alvarez et al 2001;Ma et al 2013). There exists a "limiting capillary pressure" (P Ã c ) above which foam lamellae cannot sustain in the high-quality regime (Khatib et al 1988).…”

Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Foam texture is a key variable in both the gas relative permeability and viscosity effect on gas-mobility reduction, and this feature is included in several foam models (Kovscek et al 1995;Afsharpoor et al 2010), as discussed in this work. It is expected that foam texture reaches some maximum value, with bubbles reaching roughly the pore size, in the low-quality regime (Rossen and Wang 1999;Alvarez et al 2001). In contrast, foam texture is smaller than the maximum value and is sensitive to capillary pressure in the high-quality regime .…”

Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experimental results show that foam exhibits shear-thinning behaviors in porous media (Falls et al 1989;Friedmann et al 1991;Alvarez et al 2001), indicat-ing that an increase in gas velocity causes a decrease in foam apparent viscosity. Physically, this behavior is a result of both the yield stress and a shear-thinning drag on the moving bubbles (Hirasaki and Lawson 1985;).…”

Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other factors, such as surfactant type and concentration (Alvarez et al 2001;Apaydin and Kovscek 2001;Mannhardt and Svorstøl 2001), brine salinity (Aronson et al 1994), temperature (Zerhboub et al 1994), gas type (Farajzadeh et al 2009(Farajzadeh et al , 2011, formation permeability and permeability variations (Ransohoff and Radke 1988;Kibodeaux et al 1994;Zerhboub et al 1994;Parlar et al 1995;Chowdiah et al 1998;Tanzil et al 2002b;Ma et al 2012;Farajzadeh et al 2014;Conn et al 2014), also play a role in affecting foam mobility in porous media. Because so many variables can affect foam mobility, it is important to understand how and under what conditions various factors contribute to foam-mobility control through numerical models (Kibodeaux 1997).…”

Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling Techniques for Foam Flow in Porous Media

et al. 2015

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Foam, a dispersion of gas in liquid, has been investigated as a tool for gas-mobility and conformance control in porous media for a variety of applications since the late 1950s. These applications include enhanced oil recovery, matrix-acidization treatments, gasleakage prevention, as well as contaminated-aquifer remediation. To understand the complex physics of foam in porous media and to implement foam processes in a more-controllable way, various foam-modeling techniques were developed in the past 3 decades.This paper reviews modeling approaches obtained from different publications for describing foam flow through porous media. Specifically, we tabulate models on the basis of their respective characteristics, including implicit-texture as well as mechanistic population-balance foam models. In various population-balance models, how foam texture is obtained and how gas mobility is altered as a function of foam texture, among other variables, are presented and compared. It is generally understood that both the gas relative permeability and viscosity vary in the reduction of gas mobility through foam generation in porous media. However, because the two parameters appear together in the Darcy equation, different approaches were taken to alter the mobility in the various models: only reduction of gas relative permeability, increasing of effective gas viscosity, or a combination of both. The applicability and limitations of each approach are discussed. How various foam-generation mechanisms play a role in the foam-generation function in mechanistic models is also discussed in this review, which is indispensable to reconcile the findings from different publications. In addition, other foam-modeling methods, such as the approaches that use fractional-flow theory and those that use percolation theory, are also reviewed in this work. Several challenges for foam modeling, including model selection and enhancement, fitting parameters to data, modeling oil effect on foam behavior, and scaling up of foam models, are also discussed at the end of this paper.

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Section: Introduction To Foam In Porous Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%