مشخصات پژوهش

According to the advancement of technology, population growth, and increasing energy needs in the world, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) from oil reservoirs is essential. One of these methods is the injection of W/O emulsions. Injection of water in oil emulsions due to the low interfacial tension and also having a higher viscosity than water and oil, increases oil production from reservoirs. Emulsion formation during production from oil reservoirs or even on the surface is one of the common phenomena in the oil industry. Viscosity and stability of emulsions are very important parameters that have a significant impact on the transfer, separation and sale of oil. The purposes of this work were to investigate the effect of water content and pressure on the viscosity of emulsions and also to present an experimental mathematical model for predicting viscosity at different pressures and water content. Viscosity was measured by a rolling ball viscometer that made and calibrated by this team. The results show that the viscosity of the emulsions is a strong function of water content and pressure and increases significantly with increasing these two parameters. In the next step, according to the viscosity behavior with pressure, three mathematical models were developed. Examination of errors related to each of the models illustrated that the lowest error between 2-7% was related to the exponential base model and the second-degree polynomial based model and the highest error was related to the linear base model. Among these three models, the polynomial base model showed the best and the linear base model showed the worst performance in prediction of viscosity. The most errors related to linear, exponential and polynomial models were, 11.96, 6.99 and 4.52%, respectively, which occurred at pressures of 12.53, 12.53 and 1000 psi respectively.