ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-1

Chapter 2: Microscopic Displacement

Forces acting on a fluid in a reservoir:
1. Capillary forces
2. Viscous forces
3. Gravitational forces

Capillary Forces: Forces arising from the presence of interfaces and

interfacial tension.

Surface Tension or Interfacial Tension: A tensile force present in all

interfaces between fluids that arises from an imbalance in the
intermolecular attraction working on molecules located at the interface.
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 SI units for interfacial tension are N/m. Other units are dynes/cm
and mN/m.
 Surface tension can also be viewed as energy required to increase the
surface area by one unit.

Work = force x Distance = L x dx =  x Ldx =dA

Note that surface tension refers to liquid-gas interfaces and interfacial
tension refers to liq.-liq. Interfaces.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-4
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Measurement of surface tension and IFT

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Capillary Rise:

Force balance at the interface gives:

(2r )( cos  )  r 2 h(  w   a ) g

or

rh(  w   a ) g

2 cos 
This method works well only when it can be
assumed that the contact angle is near zero. The
contact angle is difficult to measure in a small
capillary tube.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-9

DuNouy Ring Method:

f
Force f = 4r or  
4r
Since IFT does not always work vertically, a correction factor is needed.
f
 . Value of  depends on the wire diameter and the density
4r
difference between the two fluids.  is determined by using fluids of
known IFT.
Other methods: pendent drop method and spinning drop method.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-10

Wettability

 Wettability refers to the tendency of one fluid to spread on or adhere

to a solid surface in the presence of a second fluid.
 When two fluid phases are in contact with a solid surface, often one
of them is attracted to the solid more strongly.
 The more strongly attracted phase is called the wetting phase.
 Wettability affects how the fluid phases are distributed in a porous
medium.
 It has a strong influence on the capillary pressure and relative
permeability characteristics of rock-fluid systems.
 The presence of a residual non-wetting phase has a large effect on
the permeability of the medium to the wetting phase.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-11
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Contact Angle
 The angle of contact of the
interface with the solid surface,
measured through the wetting
phase is called “contact angle.”
 Force balance at the point where
the fluid-fluid interface meets the
solid gives:

 os   ws   ow cos 

It is generally not possible to measure  os and  ws directly, but the

angle  and the interfacial tension ow can be easily measured.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-13

Capillary Pressure

 Fluid-fluid interfaces within porous rocks are generally highly

curved.
 A consequence of the presence of interfacial tension is that the
pressure on both sides a curved interface cannot be equal.
 The fluid-phase on the concave side of the interface needs to be at
a higher pressure to maintain the stability of the curved interface.
 This pressure difference is given by the Laplace equation.
1 1
P      , where r1 and r2 are the principal radii of
 r1 r2 
curvature of the interface.
R
 For a fluid-fluid interface in a capillary tube, r1  r2  ,
cos 
where R is the radius of the capillary and  is the contact angle.
2 cos 
 Therefore in a capillary tube, P  Pc 
R
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-14

Capillary Pressure in a Porous Medium

 The curvature of the fluid-fluid interfaces changes with changing

saturation. This makes the capillary pressure a function of
saturation.
 When the wetting phase saturation is small, the interfaces occur
in smaller pores and are highly curved. This makes PC high at
low wetting phase saturations.
 When the wetting phase saturation is high, the interfaces are less
curved and PC is lower.
 PC becomes zero at certain value of the wetting phase saturation.
At this point, all non-wetting phase is in the form of trapped
globules.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-15

Viscous Force

 Viscous force is reflected in the pressure gradient generated by the

flow through a porous medium.
 The pressure gradient is proportional to the viscosity and the fluid
velocity and inversely proportional to the conductivity of the medium.
p 8v
 For a circular tube:  2 , where r is the radius of the capillary
L r
tube, v , is the average velocity,  is the viscosity and L is the length.
 For a porous medium, the pressure gradient is given by Darcy’s law:
p v
 , where v is the Darcy velocity and k is the permeability.
L k
 The Darcy velocity is a superficial velocity obtained by dividing the
flow rate by cross-sectional area of the rock.
v
 The actual average interstitial velocity is given by: v  , where  is

the porosity.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-16

Dominance of Capillary Forces over Viscous Forces

Consider the displacement of oil by water from a

capillary tube, at velocity v . For simplicity let us
assume that  w  o   .
8Lv 2 cos 
pB  p A   2

r r

Typical values are:  = 1.0 cp and  = 30 mN/m and velocity = 0.3 m/d.
Calculated vales of pB – pA are listed in Table 2.2 for different r’s .

Note that the capillary force is much higher than the viscous force and
the downstream pressure is higher.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-17

Phase Trapping

 When oil is displaced from a rock, the process is never perfect and a
part of the oil is left behind in the form of globules or ganglia.
 Developing EOR techniques requires understanding how the
trapping occurs and how can the trapped oil be mobilized.
 The actual mechanism in real rocks is quite complex and difficult to
describe mathematically.
 A number of simplified models provide insight into the mechanisms
involved.
 We will examine some of these.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-18

Trapping in a straight Capillary tube

 Experiments show that the pressure gradient required to move a drop

of a non-wetting phase through a capillary tube is higher than what
would be predicted by the pipe flow equation.
 The reason is the pressure discontinuity at the oil/water interfaces.
 If the discontinuity was the same on both sides of the drop, the effect
should cancel out.
 In reality, the discontinuity is not of the same magnitude on both
sides of the drop, due to the contact angle hysteresis.
 At the downstream side, the contact angle is water receding, while at
the upstream side it is water advancing.
 Water advancing angle can be considerably larger than water
receding contact angle.
 It makes the radius of curvature smaller at the downstream interface,
making that pressure discontinuity larger.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-19

After the flow has stopped:

 2o / w cos    2o / w cos  

p A  p B     
 r A  r B
2ow
 (cos B  cos A )
r

This pressure difference is positive, since angle B is smaller than A. So

a positive pressure difference exists at zero velocity and to move the oil
drop requires this pressure difference to be exceeded.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-20

Trapping at Pore Throats

 As an oil drop is pushed through a pore throat, it downstream end

gets squeezed into a much narrower segment, making its radius of
curvature much smaller than the upstream part.
 This again generates a pressure drop due to the difference in
capillary pressure at the leading and the trailing interfaces.

 2 o / w cos A   2 o / w cos B 
p      
 rA   rB 
Using typical values: ow = 25 mN/m, rA = 15 microns, rB = 6.0 microns,
A = B = 0, L = 0.01 cm.
P = 4.8 kPa and P/L = 47.3 MPa/m = 2,073 psi/ft.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-21

Pore Doublet Model

It can be shown that in a water-wet doublet, the displacement velocity is

higher in the smaller pore and the oil gets trapped in the larger pore.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-22

For pore #1:

8 w L w v1
p A  p wi 
r12
2 cos 
p oi  p wi 
r1
8 L v
p oi  p B  o 2 o 1
r1
Assuming that  w  o   and defining L = Lw + Lo, we get
8 L v1 2 cos 
pB  pA   2

r1 r1
Similarly for the second pore,
8 L v 2 2 cos 
pB  pA   
r22 r2
The overall pressure change is same for both pores, therefore:
8 L v 2 2 cos  8 L v1 2 cos 
   
r22 r2 r12 r1
This equation gives a relationship between v2 and v1.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-23

r22  cos  r22  1 1 

v 2  2 v1    
r2 4L  r1 r2 
For v2 to be positive, we must satisfy

 cos  r12  1 1 
v1    
4L  r1 r2 
The values of v1 needed to make v2 positive are listed in Table 2.4 for a
typical case. At reservoir type velocities, v2 will not be positive and oil
will be displaced only from the smaller pore. Once the water breaks
through at the other end of the pore doublet, the oil in the larger pore is
trapped and very difficult to mobilize.
ENCH 629 Secondary and Tertiary Recovery 2-24