Foam stability and electrokinetic phenomena: Comparison between simulation and experimental results

Abstract

This work evaluated foam stability and electrokinetic phenomena that occurs in a sand pack simulation model when undergoing a foam injection process. The method used was a Finite Element Method. To evaluate a wide range of possible foam conditions, Sodium Dodecyl Sulphate with three different surfactant concentration (7500, 10 000 and 12 500 ppm) was used, obtaining a range of output voltage of 0.42-0.74 mV. One of surfactant characteristic in this study is biosurfactant which is environmental friendly and were used in previous experimental and simulation work. The numerical simulation were performed using 2 Dimensional rectangle geometry setup with a 30.4 cm length and 3.4 cm diameter which acts as a sand pack model and applying multiphysics (computational fluid dynamics, chemical reaction engineering, microelectromechanicals, electrochemistry and electrodeposition module) to simulate the numerical model. The simulation results obtained from the model implemented in COMSOL were used to compare with previous experimental and simulation work in relation to foam stability and associated streaming signals. Based on the comparison, the electrokinetic signal measurement was found to decrease with increasing surfactant concentration. However, the output voltage was slightly different due to different type of model used, different electrode geometry and arrangement, and some uncertainties caused by human error which affect the accuracy and sensitivity of the measurement. Therefore, monitoring foam progression in enhanced oil recovery is necessary to ensure the effectiveness of foam injection process.