Polymer enhanced oil recovery; soft matter physics to explain an industrial question

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• Dr Andrew Clarke, Schlumberger Gould Research
• Friday 29 May 2015, 14:00-15:00
• Small Lecture Theatre, Cavendish Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Eileen Nugent.

Chemical enhanced oil recovery technologies are applied soft matter science. For the particular case of polymer enhanced oil recovery, Chinese workers have claimed significant additional oil recovery when high molecular weight polymers (>18MDa) are flowed through their reservoirs. However, incumbent theoretical frameworks do not admit any mechanism for such an enhancement and hence doubt exists in the literature. The answer lies in the recently developed concepts of viscoelastic flow and elastic turbulence. In this presentation the background industrial context will be described together with the relevant multi-phase oil recovery experiments. Single and multi-phase viscoelastic flows will be discussed with the aid of results from bench rheological and microfluidic measurements. Together, the results will be used to explain the additional oil recovery that can be seen and why not all experiments have observed it.

This talk is part of the BSS Formal Seminars series.

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