Effects of viscoelastic polymer solutions on the oil extraction from dead ends

Authors

1 Department of Chemical Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran

2 Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This research deals with the numerical simulation of two viscoelastic fluids flow in an open capillary of a reservoir. The Oldroyd-B and Leonov models have been used to describe the rheological behavior of polymer solutions. The nite volume method on a structured and collocated grid has been used for discretization the governing equations. The discrete elastic viscous stress splitting technique also has been used. The steady state, isothermal and incompressible fluids past through a two dimensional micropore have been considered. The numerical method has been validated through the comparison of numerical results by the analytical solutions of Oldroyd-B fluid flow through a planar channel.

The effects of fluid characteristics and operating
conditions on the oil sweeping from the dead ends are investigated. The contours of velocity, stream function and pressure are presented, and the swept depth is calculated. The presented results show that with increasing the Weissenberg number the swept depth of
ooding fluid in the dead ends increases considerably. However, in the studied range, the Reynolds number does not have any signi cant e ects on the sweep efficiency. The results also show that the swept depth in the case of viscoelastic fluids is more than the Newtonian and generalized Newtonian fluids.

Keywords

Scientia Iranica
Volume 20, Issue 6 - Serial Number 13
Transactions on Chemistry (C)
December 2013
Pages 1912-1920

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