In recent decades, due to the growing energy consumption around the world, the consumption of fossil fuels including oil and its derivatives has been on the rise. However, extraction from oil reservoirs has been declining over the life of the reservoir due to the pressure drop caused by production. Therefore, enhanced oil recovery from oil reservoirs is one of the issues that has received special attention in the past few years. In the last decade, among the new methods of enhanced oil recovery, the injection of smart water into oil reservoirs has received special attention. Among the common mechanisms governing the increase of oil extraction in this method, the formation of oil in water emulsions as a result of the interaction between these two phases can affect the performance of smart water injection. Therefore, the study of interactions between ions forming salts such as sodium, magnesium, calcium and sulfate in injected water along with myristic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids as polar substances in crude oil, with the approach of oil-in-water emulsion as a governing mechanism in smart water injection, it deserves more importance for study, which has been discussed in this study. The studies conducted in this project were conducted with the aim of focusing on the effect of the type of fatty acids and the presence of active ions in the system which have been studied using methods such as volumetric methods, analysis of microscopic images and measurement of zeta potential.
The most stable emulsion formed in this system is an emulsion in the presence of myristic fatty acid and sodium sulfate salt. The results showed that the presence of fatty acids and salts play a significant role in the stability of emulsions. Given that the present study is defined by a basic approach and mechanism, it is expected that the findings of the present study will be useful for a better understanding of the treatment of undesirable emulsions and in order to better use the desired em