Experimental Investigation of Factors Affecting Miscible Two-Phase Flow in Fractured and Non-Fractured Micromodels

Micromodel is small-scale artificial model of porous medium which is known as a novel approach for simulating flow and transport in porous media. For better understanding the effect of fracture geometrical properties on oil recovery efficiency, a series of first contact miscible solvent injection process were conducted on horizontal glass micromodels at several fixed flow rate conditions. The micromodels were initially saturated with the heavy crude oil. The produced oil as a function of injected volume of solvents was measured using image analysis of the provided pictures. The concentration calibration curves of solvents in heavy crude oil were used for evaluating the solvents concentration. Several fractured and non-fractured quarter five-spot micromodels were generated by chemically etching process. The result of the experiments show that the produced oil decreased when the flow rate, fracture spacing, fracture discontinuity, fracture overlap, and fracture distribution were increased. In contrast, the produced oil increased, when the solvent viscosity, fracture orientation angles, fracture discontinuity-distribution and the number of fracture were increased. In addition, an optimum solvent composition is proposed.