Foam generation and transport in porous media are a proven method to improve the sweep efficiency of a flooding fluid in enhanced oil recovery process and increase the effectiveness of a treatment fluid in well intervention procedures. Foam in the porous media is often generated using surfactant alternating gas or co-injection. Although these operations result in good incremental production, the profit losses could be high due to surfactant retention and lack of water injection facilities in the target fields. One way of reducing foam generation operations expenses is by injecting the surfactant solution disperse throughout the gas phase in a process called “disperse foam.” Core-flooding experimental results have shown that disperse foam techniques reduce the surfactant retention and increase cumulative oil production. This increase means that not only the foam is being generated but also it is blocking the high mobility channels and enhancing the sweep efficiency. Additionally, the operational implementation in field operations is very simple and reduces significantly operational costs of the process. Because few laboratory core-flooding tests and field pilots have been executed using the disperse foam technique, there is a high level of uncertainty associated with the method. Besides, the models reported in the literature do not account for all the associated phenomena, including the surfactant droplets transfer between the gas and liquid phases, and the lamellae stability at low water saturation. For this reason, the development of a mechanistic disperse foam model is key to understand the phenomena associated with “disperse foam” operations. In this work, we use a previous foam mechanistic model to develop a disperse foam model that includes the physicochemical mechanisms of the foaming process a core scale. The model accounts for the foamer mass transference between the gas and liquid phases in a non-equilibrium state with a particle interception model, also accounts for the reversible and irreversible surfactant adsorption on the rock surface in dynamic conditions with a first-order kinetic model, and includes foam generation, coalescence and, transport using a population balance mechanistic model.

中文翻译：

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使用发泡剂液滴注射进行原位发泡的新模型的开发和验证

多孔介质中的泡沫生成和传输是一种行之有效的方法，可以提高提高采收率过程中驱油液的波及效率，并提高油井干预程序中处理液的有效性。多孔介质中的泡沫通常是使用表面活性剂交替气体或共注射产生的。尽管这些操作产生了良好的增量生产，但由于表面活性剂的保留和目标油田缺乏注水设施，利润损失可能很高。减少泡沫产生操作费用的一种方法是在称为“分散泡沫”的过程中注入分散在整个气相中的表面活性剂溶液。岩心驱油实验结果表明，分散泡沫技术降低了表面活性剂的滞留量并增加了累积石油产量。这种增加意味着不仅会产生泡沫，而且还会阻塞高流动性通道并提高吹扫效率。此外，现场操作中的操作实施非常简单，并显着降低了该过程的操作成本。由于使用分散泡沫技术进行的实验室岩心驱油测试和现场试验很少，因此该方法存在高度的不确定性。此外，文献中报道的模型并未考虑所有相关现象，包括气相和液相之间的表面活性剂液滴转移，以及低含水饱和度下的片晶稳定性。出于这个原因，机械分散泡沫模型的开发是理解与“分散泡沫”操作相关的现象的关键。在这项工作中，我们使用先前的泡沫机理模型来开发分散泡沫模型，该模型包括发泡过程的物理化学机制和核心尺度。该模型用粒子拦截模型解释了非平衡状态下气液相之间的泡沫剂传质，也用一阶动力学模型解释了动态条件下岩石表面可逆和不可逆表面活性剂吸附，包括泡沫生成、聚结和使用种群平衡机制模型的运输。