2017/08/30 by Ketzasmin A. Terrón-Mejía, Terrón-Mejía, Ketzasmin A., Roberto López-Rendon +5
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Surfactants and Colloidal Systems #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1708.09510
10 figures; to appear in Scientific Reports
openalex publication_date 2017/08/30 · arxiv created 2017/08/31 · arxiv updated 2017/09/01 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The need to extract oil from wells where it is embedded on the surfaces of rocks has led to the development of new and improved enhanced oil recovery techniques. One of those is the injection of surfactants with water vapor, which promotes desorption of oil that can then be extracted using pumps, as the surfactants encapsulate the oil in foams. However, the mechanisms that lead to the optimal desorption of oil and the best type of surfactants to carry out desorption are not well known yet, which warrants the need to carry out basic research on this topic. In this work, we report non equilibrium dissipative particle dynamics simulations of model surfactants and oil molecules adsorbed on surfaces, with the purpose of studying the efficiency of the surfactants to desorb hydrocarbon chains, that are found adsorbed over flat surfaces. The model surfactants studied correspond to nonionic and cationic surfactants, and the hydrocarbon desorption is studied as a function of surfactant concentration under increasing Poiseuille flow. We obtain various hydrocarbon desorption isotherms for every model of surfactant proposed, under flow. Nonionic surfactants are found to be the most effective to desorb oil and the mechanisms that lead to this phenomenon are presented and discussed.