Issue 56, 2016, Issue in Progress

Effects of interfacial tension and emulsification on displacement efficiency in dilute surfactant flooding

Abstract

This study provides an investigation on the effect of interfacial tension (IFT) and emulsification on displacement efficiency in dilute surfactant flooding. In previous studies, usually the surfactant concentration or type was changed to achieve different IFT levels. However, in this study, only one surfactant with a constant concentration of 0.2 wt% was used to obtain five surfactant formulations with different IFT levels of 101, 10−1, 10−2, 10−3, and 10−4 mN m−1 by changing the salinity of the salt water to eliminate the influence of the surfactant concentration or type. The emulsifying rates of the five surfactant formulations were measured. The emulsion stability was evaluated by measuring the backscattering and transmission light using a Turbiscan LAB. It turned out that the five surfactant formulations had a unique characteristic that their emulsifying ability successively decreased with the reduction of the IFT. These five surfactant formulations were used to evaluate the effect of the IFT and emulsification on the displacement efficiency by core flooding experiments. The results indicated that the obtained additional displacement efficiency decreased with the increase of the emulsification ability but increased with the reduction of the IFT, which confirms that the lower the IFT, the higher the displacement efficiency in dilute surfactant flooding. Simultaneously, the reduction of the IFT might have a more important role on improving displacement efficiency for residual oil after water flooding than emulsification since the additional displacement efficiency decreased with the increase of emulsification.

Graphical abstract: Effects of interfacial tension and emulsification on displacement efficiency in dilute surfactant flooding

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
07 Mar 2016
Accepted
19 May 2016
First published
20 May 2016

RSC Adv., 2016,6, 50640-50649

Effects of interfacial tension and emulsification on displacement efficiency in dilute surfactant flooding

W. Pu, C. Yuan, W. Hu, T. Tan, J. Hui, S. Zhao, S. Wang and Y. Tang, RSC Adv., 2016, 6, 50640 DOI: 10.1039/C6RA06027G

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements