Veröffentlichungen und Präsentationen

Recovery of oil by gas injection is usually inefficient due to the low viscosity of the gas, which results in bypassing of the oil. By adding surfactant solutions it is possible to get in-situ foam formation. Foam has a much higher “viscosity” and hence does not bypass the oil, leading to enhanced oil recovery. In this context, the foam propagation is studied experimentally and theoretically. We measured the pressure gradient in unconsolidated sand and Bentheimer sandstone cores to improve the understanding of foam propagation. In order to interpret the experiment we simulated the foam propagation process with a 1-D model. The agreement between the experimental results and the COMSOL Multiphysics® simulations is good, but we stress that we use empirical expressions for the foam source term.