Polymer And Surfactant-Polymer Emulsion Comparative Behavior Analysis Pre And Post Flooding Through Porous Medium

Polymer and emulsions flow in porous media plays an important role in many enhanced oil recovery processes.Despite all the efforts,the detailed mechanism of how these fluids,specifically emulsions,flow through the pore space is not completely understood,as well as the contribution of Surfactant/Polymer(SP)emulsions to produced crude oil.This study focused on water in oil(W/O)emulsion and polymer solution,to understand the behavior and fluid properties changes under typical flooding process conditions on laboratory cores performance.Emulsion flowing pressure,drop size distribution,demulsification and viscosity were measured at different porous volume outflow per almost 8 hours.On the other hand,a polymer with a viscosity similar to emulsion was created,it was made to flow in the porous medium per almost 4 hours and finally compared with the performance of the emulsion.Results were obtained that lead to the better understanding of both fluids.The results show that after flooding through porous medium geometry,the emulsion properties changes on totally compare with polymer.On the pressure behavior,the polymer has a stable performance on time with two flows rates(0.2 mL/min and 0.4 mL/min),but the emulsion flooding pressure behavior was not stable,varying very quickly after 8 hour.Due to the drop size reduction on emulsion after be subject to 4 PV flow shear rates,the viscosity increased even though the emulsion keep emulsified on time with very few quantity of separated fluids,before and after the flooding experiment.At the other site,the polymer viscosity maintain stable on rheology behavior pre and post flow.In conclusion,emulsion continue having unstable when is bring under flow through porous medium compare with polymer,but they are still two of the main methods on EOR using nowadays.