Investigation of condensing, three-phase, two-component, flow through porous media

The supply of light, easily recoverable crude oil is rapidly being depleted, necessitating development of processes to recover the remaining heavy and residual crudes. To design efficient thermal recovery processes, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms associated with nonisothermal, transient, multiphase flow through porous media. Steam injection into a two-dimensional sand, saturated with water and oil at the irreducible water saturation was investigated. Relative-permeability data for this specific fluid-sand system were measured and used for input to the numerical simulator. The effect of steam injection rate and relative orientation of gravitational and viscous forces were studied. Since simulated results are extremely sensitive to changes in relative permeability, water-oil and oil-steam relative permeability was measured for the specific fluid-sand system. The numerical simulator written for the project uses a finite difference technique. A comparison of experimental and simulated results show simulated oil production is consistently high.