Experimental Study of theEffect of Hydrophilic Silica Nanoparticles on Foam Performance in Alkaline-Surfactant-Gas flooding

Alkali-Surfactant-Gas (ASG) flooding is one of the novel chemical techniques in Enhanced Oil Recovery. In this technique, the co-injection of gas and chemical slug results in the formation of foam. Foam reduces the mobilityof injected chemical solutions and improves the displacement efficiency of the process.Foams in practice are generally generated and stabilized with surfactants.However,surfactant stabilized foams have some weakness.If nanoparticles were utilized instead of or with surfactants, foams stabilized with such particles could have a number of important advantages. The main purpose of this research is creation of stable foam with nanoparticles and utilizing this nanoparticle stabilized foam for mobility control of injected fluids in enhanced oil recovery applications. Finally, the performance of the foam that is created and stabilized with mixture of surfactant and nanoparticles was compared withthe foam that is created and stabilized withonly surfactant in alkaline-surfactant-gas process in terms of oil recovery from coreflood experiments. In this research, hydrophilic silica nanoparticles with an average size of ۱۰ nm were used.The mixture of surfactant and hydrophilic silica nanoparticles in various concentration were used to foam generation.The results of the experiments showed that the concentration of surfactant and nanoparticles should be selected optimize. In theexperiments, most oil recovery was obtained when the concentration of both surfactant and hydrophilic silica nanoparticles in chemical solution was selected ۰.۵ weight percent.

Keywords:

Enhanced Oil Recovery , Chemical Flooding , Foam , Nanoparticles , Mobility Control