Experimental study of the effects of surfactant material and hydrocarbon agent on foam stability with the approach of enhanced oil recovery

摘要

Injecting foam into hydrocarbon reservoirs in order to transport the fluid is amongst the novel methods for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Stability of foam is the main challenge to successful usage of it in EOR. One of the challenges of using foam in oil recovery is to maintain its stability in the face of the oil phase. So, it is required that before using foam in the processes of enhancing the recovery, the properties of foam and its mutual behavior toward the oil be known. Therefore, by making two different experimental setups in this study, the effect of changing the properties of four surfactants (CAPB and three selected surfactants in past research (SDS, CTAB, AOS)) and four oil phases on foam stability have been studied. In the experiments of bulk scale, foam has been produced by distributing the air into a vertical column containing surfactant solution. The experimental setup built in bubble scale is composed of one transparent Hele-Shaw cell. By computer processing of recorded images captured by a camera, the evolutionary process of foam has been studied qualitatively and quantitatively.