Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is an important energy technology. It involves injection of complex fluids containing chemicals that help improve oil recovery, in particular, net oil recovered, sweeping efficiency, net present value, and so on. Therefore, quantitative evaluation of these performance measures of any EOR flooding scheme is very important for decision making. Current practice does not account accurately for some important physical effects such as elasticity of the complex displacing fluids which can have a significant bearing on the net oil recovered. This project will enable accurate modeling of the underlying physical processes as well as contribute to the development of efficient numerical methods and software to solve the complex mathematical equations describing these EOR processes. One of the fundamental phenomena, known as elastic turbulence, a subject of intense current study in the turbulence area, also has a significant role to play in the EOR processes in porous media. This is due to the fact that an increase in drag due to elastic turbulence is undesirable from an economic point of view for EOR. Complex systems of mathematical equations to be used in our study will advance the field of computational mathematics, computational fluid dynamics and theoretical fluid mechanics, in particular, complex fluids and elastic turbulence. Progress in these areas has been very slow and the proposed work will advance they state-of-the-art. Research findings will advance the area of fluid mechanics and will have an impact in many engineering disciplines, applied and computational mathematics, and computational science, to name a few. The project also has many educational components.
The PI will study chemical enhanced oil recovery processes theoretically and numerically by developing appropriate numerical methods and software for this purpose. In particular, the PI will develop a novel multiphase, multi-component, viscoelastic, porous media flow model, efficient and high order accurate novel multi-scale finite element- and method of characteristics-based numerical methods for highly heterogeneous media, and user-friendly software encapsulating the numerical methods. The work combines theory, modeling and computation, and blends knowledge from fluid dynamics, porous media flows, numerical analysis, partial differential equations and scientific computing to gain insight into several fundamental problems: How does the elasticity modify development of linear and fingering instabilities? What is the mechanism behind transition from elastic instability to elastic turbulence in porous media as the Weissenberg number is gradually increased? How do different rheological properties affect the sweeping efficiency of displacement processes and net oil recovered? Numerical simulations with the software developed will play a significant role in this direction. The potential benefit of the proposed research lies in its open-ended nature which can further stimulate basic research and applications related to numerical methods, complex fluids and their use in EOR. Our research will contribute to rapidly developing fields of numerical methods and fast algorithms for EOR using viscoelastic fluid models in porous media, transition to elastic turbulence in porous media and scientific computing. This project is part of a broader research program in the PI's group on fluid mechanics, enhanced oil recovery, interfacial dynamics, multiphase multi-component continuous and heterogeneous porous media flows, fast high-order algorithms, and scientific computing.
