Investigation of the Effects of Silica Nanofluid for Enhanced Oil Recovery Applications: CFD Simulation Study

With the advancement in nanotechnology and the importance of developing enhanced oil recovery methods to extract more hydrocarbons and overcome the challenges of the chemical method, more attention has been given to investigating the effects of various cost-effective and environmentally friendly nanoparticles. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) has served as an accurate tool to predict crude oil displacement for the enhanced oil recovery process. To the best of our knowledge, few CFD simulations investigating the effect of injecting silica nanofluid into a micromodel have been performed for observing the oil recovery. In this work, simulation of silica nanofluid flooding into a 2D micromodel is studied to replicate a previous experiment of injecting silica nanoparticles with synthetic seawater, in which micromodel flooding was carried out. The micromodel geometry was created using SolidWorks software and ANSYS-Fluent workbench was used for analysing the volume fraction contours. The volume of fluid model and continuum surface force equations were used to model the interaction between wall–fluid to model the wettability of the micromodel wall, and fluid–fluid for oil and nanofluid interaction. Moreover, silica nanofluid properties were estimated by using thermophysical equations. It was observed that injecting silica-based nanofluid into water wet micromodel provided more oil recovery than oil wet micromodel. The comparison between oil recovery from experiment and simulation indicated a relative error of 19% with general good agreements. Furthermore, the low concentration of 0.2% and 1% of nanoparticles provided an oil recovery of 87% and 88% from the oil wet media, respectively.