Browsing by Author "Lin, Pei-Hsuan"

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    Lattice-Boltzmann Modeling of Potential Fluid Flow Impairment Caused by Asphaltene Deposition in Porous Media
    (2018-11-30) Lin, Pei-Hsuan; Vargas, Francisco; Biswal, Sibani L.; Akin, John E.
    Asphaltene deposition in porous media has significant effects on oil flow during primary and secondary oil production. When asphaltenes deposit in porous media, the pore throats become plugged, leading to the impairment of permeability, and in turn causes several difficulties for oil production. In order to solve the problem of asphaltene deposition in porous media, it is important to understand the mechanism of asphaltene deposition in order to find measures to mitigate this problem. Moreover, a predictive model would greatly help control and reduce asphaltene deposition at the early stage. However, the mechanism of asphaltene deposition in porous media is still unclear. Only a few deposition models have been proposed and most of them have too many fitting parameters. Hence, the objective of this study is to propose a new model which has a fewer number of fitting parameters but still effectively predicts asphaltene deposition. Furthermore, the validity of the proposed model will be verified by microchannel and core flooding experiments. Instead of using the traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods, such as the Finite Element Method, Finite Difference Method, and Finite Volume Method, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is employed to model asphaltene deposition in porous media. The benefit of using LBM for simulating fluid flow in complex geometric settings is that it is comparatively easier for computational implementation and parallel computing due to being a meshless technique. Once the mechanism of asphaltene deposition in porous media has been understood clearly, mitigation methods can be then applied to prevent asphaltene deposition. Also, the simulation tool that is developed using LBM can help reduce the cost involved in experiments, which is extremely important in the petroleum industry.