Experimental and modeling studies on adsorption of a nonionic surfactant on sandstone minerals in enhanced oil recovery process with surfactant flooding

Abstract

Surfactants have ability to reduce the interfacial tension between residual oil and water and give high recovery factor. Adsorption of surfactant onto the solid surface makes it less effective in reduction of interfacial tension in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) applications. Adsorption of Trigoonella foenum-graceum (TFG) as a nonionic surfactant on crushed sandstone rock was investigated in this work. Conductivity technique was used to measure amount of surfactant adsorbed on crushed rock. Batch experiments were used to investigate the adsorption of surfactant on solid rock surface. In addition, different adsorption equilibrium and kinetic models were fitted to experimental data and parameters for each model were determined. Among the two and three equilibrium models, the Jovanovic and Brouers-Sotolongo models exhibited better predictions and were most suitable for prediction of surfactant adsorption. The kinetic adsorption of surfactant was best suited to pseudo-second order model. Furthermore, the experimental adsorption data were modeled using a method named GA-RBF. It was concluded that the proposed GA-RBF model is accurate in prediction of kinetic adsorption behavior of surfactant. The results of this study can be useful in surfactant selection in EOR processes especially for chemical flooding schemes.