Abstract
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is a process that extends reservoir life through field operations that aim to increase reservoir displacement efficiency. Injection of polymeric solutions, which is a chemical EOR process, improves sweep efficiency by decreasing the mobility of the injected fluids. One challenge in polymer flooding is to model the non-Newtonian rheological behavior of the injected solutions due to the complex interdependence between fluid flow velocity, fluid viscosity and shear rate. Proper reservoir management requires a thorough understanding of non-Newtonian fluid flow behavior through porous media, thus the need for new and improved mathematical models that describe the transient pressure behavior in wells. In this work we consider the flow of non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluids in homogeneous isotropic porous media. To describe the rheological polymer behavior, we used the well-known power-law model, which leads to a nonlinear problem. In this paper, a novel semi-analytical solution is obtained by combining spatial domain discretization with pseudotime, so the flow problem is rewritten as a system of linear equations in Laplace domain. We also presented a variation of the proposed solution by assuming a pseudostationary behavior of the non-Newtonian velocity. Both approaches are compared to previously published approximated analytical solutions. One interesting aspect of our work is that it can be extended to more realistic polymer rheological models.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call