Abstract—Pore wetting plays an important role on enhanced oil recovery because of its effects on fluid saturation, flow behavior and displacement breakthrough pressure of reservoir fluids in porous medium. This paper aims towards measuring contact angles of alcohol aqueous solutions and breakthrough pressures required for air displacing alcohol aqueous solutions in a single micro-size water-wet pore and oil-wet pore. The liquids used are methanol, ethanol, 1-propanol aqueous solutions which could represent the fundamental components of surfactant solutions used in surfactant flooding process. The pores used are silica pores and PMMA pores, which simulate water-wet pores and oil-wet pores in the oil reservoirs. Our results indicate that the contact angle of alcohol aqueous solutions in a silica pore and PMMA pore decreases when the concentration of alcohol increases before reaching CMC. The contact angle decreases more dramatically with the alcohol concentration in an oil-wet pore than in a water-wet pore. The breakthrough pressure increases linearly with the surface tension in the water-wet pore. However, in the oil-wet pore, the breakthrough pressure stops increasing with surface tension when the surface tension is larger than around 35 mN/m.
Index Terms—Enhanced oil recovery, displacement, multiphase flow, pore wetting.
The authors are with the Institute for Materials and Processes, School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, UK (e-mail: X.Li@ed.ac.uk, X.Fan@ed.ac.uk).
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Cite: Xingxun Li and Xianfeng Fan, "Pore Wetting and Its Effect on Breakthrough Pressure in Water-Wet and Oil-Wet Pores," International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications vol. 5, no. 4 pp. 359-362, 2014.
