TY - JOUR
T1 - Pore-scale study on interfacial force-induced residue mobilization under immiscible ternary fluids flow
AU - Li, Hongxia
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the High-Performance Cloud Computing Platform of Alibaba Cloud (Project No. 8434000403). The author would like to thank Dr. Haibo Huang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Dr. Weilin Yang from Jiangnan University for their insightful discussion on the LBM simulations and valuable comments in improving this manuscript. This work was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the author wants to thank all the colleagues and friends for their remote support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - Immiscible three-phase flow and the trapping/mobilizing mechanism are significant to many water and energy applications such as water infiltration, oily wastewater treatment, CO2 sequestration, and water-alternating-gas (WAG) for oil recovery enhancement. This work targets the ternary fluid system, namely water, gas, and oil, to uncover the significant role of interfacial forces in the transient flow behavior and trapped-phase mobilization. From both the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) modeling and experimental observations, we firstly showed the deformation and mobilization process of the oil droplet when interacting with water droplet in air. The re-distribution of oil phase reveals the strong interfacial interactions at the water-gas-oil three-phase contact point (fluid-TPCP). For the more complicated three-phase flow in porous media, our visualization results also showed that the trapped oil phase, which initially adhered to rough surfaces or inside dead-end pores, was extracted by the pulling effect at fluid-TPCP during WAG injection. The influence of surface wettability conditions residue extraction efficiency was also discussed. This work provides insightful understandings of the interfacial forces in mobilizing the residues under immiscible three-phase flow in porous media.
AB - Immiscible three-phase flow and the trapping/mobilizing mechanism are significant to many water and energy applications such as water infiltration, oily wastewater treatment, CO2 sequestration, and water-alternating-gas (WAG) for oil recovery enhancement. This work targets the ternary fluid system, namely water, gas, and oil, to uncover the significant role of interfacial forces in the transient flow behavior and trapped-phase mobilization. From both the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) modeling and experimental observations, we firstly showed the deformation and mobilization process of the oil droplet when interacting with water droplet in air. The re-distribution of oil phase reveals the strong interfacial interactions at the water-gas-oil three-phase contact point (fluid-TPCP). For the more complicated three-phase flow in porous media, our visualization results also showed that the trapped oil phase, which initially adhered to rough surfaces or inside dead-end pores, was extracted by the pulling effect at fluid-TPCP during WAG injection. The influence of surface wettability conditions residue extraction efficiency was also discussed. This work provides insightful understandings of the interfacial forces in mobilizing the residues under immiscible three-phase flow in porous media.
KW - Interfacial force
KW - Lattice Boltzmann Method
KW - Residue mobilization
KW - Three-phase flow
KW - Water-alternating-gas
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120748005&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2021.103913
DO - 10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2021.103913
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85120748005
SN - 0301-9322
VL - 147
JO - International Journal of Multiphase Flow
JF - International Journal of Multiphase Flow
M1 - 103913
ER -