Benchmarking methods of enhanced heavy oil recovery using a microscaled bead-pack

Abstract

A microscaled bead-pack is capable of simulating two-phase fractional flow within porous media and can be applied to simulating interactions between fluids and geological materials under dynamic conditions within the laboratory.

Recreating mineralogical petrographic heterogeneity within microfluidic chips: assembly, examples, and applications

“…For silica, commercially available soda lime glass spheres (White House Scientific, UK) are used. 16 Suitable products are not commercially available for other minerals and, accordingly, we prepare these grains by crushing rock (e.g., marble 17 ) or single crystals (e.g., orthoclase). Further details are provided in ESI, † along with the characterisation of materials used in the experiments presented below.…”

“…The experimental procedure employed to study the flow of immiscible fluids in these beds closely follows that presented previously for uniform beds. 16,17 In short: syringe pumps are used to dispense fluids into the packed bed, and a high-speed 24 bit colour camera coupled to an optical microscope is used to capture the packed bed in a sequence of still images. The acquired images are converted to gray scale and segmented to determine the distribution of the fluids within the packed bed at a given instance.…”

Reservoir-on-a-Chip (ROC): A new paradigm in reservoir engineering

“…The studies mentioned here do not use actual realistic pore spaces of rock samples and are limited to two-dimensional (2D) representations. However, Bowden et al 44,45 and others 33,34 have represented the porous medium in the form of packed beds to study the multiphase flows. They even demonstrated flooding experiments to determine recovery efficiency in such packed beads.…”

“…They even demonstrated flooding experiments to determine recovery efficiency in such packed beads. 44 Recently, Sen et al 46 computed the velocity components in a packed bed mimicking porous media using micro-PIV. These experiments are limited to engineered porous media which often include random or orderly packed granular systems without having a realistic representation of pore connectivity.…”

Visualization and quantification of two-phase flow in transparent miniature packed beds

“…This process is known as displacement, and has been studied largely in the past few decades due to its importance to reservoir engineering, hydrology, agricultural irrigation and treatment of ground water contamination [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”