Numerical and experimental investigation of micro-bubble fluid infiltration in porous media

The current limited availability of the easy access crude oil reservoirs shifted the focus of the petroleum industry towards the production of heavy oil and depleted reserves. Micro-bubble fluids (colloidal gas aphrons) have been recently used as part of water and oil based drilling fluids and have proven to effect the reduction of formation damages. However, this study presents a micro-bubble transient flow model using a finite difference method of modified implicit in pressure, explicit in saturation and the forward difference, one-point upstream weighting method for surfactant concentration calculation. The saturation and pressure profile for each phase, the concentration profile for surfactant and non-adsorbing tracer, effluent, and pressure drop history can be determined by the model. According to the pressure drop history, the micro-bubble fluid apparent viscosity can be obtained. Accordingly, the proposed model was validated with some experimental tests which were designed by the Taguchi method.