Effects of Interfacial Tension and Droplet Size on the Plugging Performance of Oil-in-Water Emulsions in Porous Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Property tests were first conducted to characterize the subject oil-in-water emulsions having three different interfacial tensions and three different droplet sizes in terms of their stability, droplet size distribution, and rheological behaviors. Then sandpack flow experiments were conducted, and permeability reduction tests were used to quantify the plugging performance of each of the different emulsions flowing at different flow rates through sandpacks. The results showed that the plugging effect of an oil-in-water emulsion was primarily due to the special flow behaviors of emulsion droplets in porous media; that is, the bulk viscosity of an emulsion contributed very little to the plugging effect. This paper has shown, for the first time, a correlation of emulsion plugging ability and interfacial tension. Permeability reduction of oil-in-water emulsions in sandpacks increased with an increase in interfacial tension and droplet size. At a fixed flow rate, emulsions with σ = 5.2 mN/m and σ = 9.3 mN/m had a more than 90% permeability reduction compared to the 66% reduction for the σ = 0.15 mN/m emulsion, and the injection pressure drop for emulsion with the largest droplet size was more than three times greater than that with the smallest droplet size. That is because, when an emulsion droplet passed through the pore constriction, the capillary resistance force it experienced increased as the interfacial tension increased, and larger droplets were more likely to be trapped in the pore constrictions than smaller droplets, therefore causing greater restrictions to the flow. Flow experiments also showed that the permeability reduction of emulsions decreased with an increase of the flow rate. In addition, the size differences of emulsion droplets in the effluents and influents were also compared and analyzed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".