Novel insights into pore-scale dynamics of wettability alteration during low salinity waterflooding.

Low salinity waterflooding has proven to accelerate oil production at core and field scales. Wettability alteration from a more oil-wetting to a more water-wetting condition has been established as one of the most notable effects of low salinity waterflooding. To induce the wettability alteration, low salinity water should be transported to come in contact with the oil-water interfaces.

Hydro-dynamic Solute Transport under Two-Phase Flow Conditions.

There are abundant examples of natural, engineering and industrial applications, in which "solute transport" and "mixing" in porous media occur under multiphase flow conditions. Current state-of-the-art understanding and modelling of such processes are established based on flawed and non-representative models. Moreover, there is no direct experimental result to show the true hydrodynamics of transport and mixing under multiphase flow conditions while the saturation topology is being kept constant for a number of flow rates.

New insights on the complex dynamics of two-phase flow in porous media under intermediate-wet conditions.

Multiphase flow in porous media is important in a number of environmental and industrial applications such as soil remediation, CO sequestration, and enhanced oil recovery. Wetting properties control flow of immiscible fluids in porous media and fluids distribution in the pore space. In contrast to the strong and weak wet conditions, pore-scale physics of immiscible displacement under intermediate-wet conditions is less understood.

Effects of intermediate wettability on entry capillary pressure in angular pores.

Entry capillary pressure is one of the most important factors controlling drainage and remobilization of the capillary-trapped phases as it is the limiting factor against the two-phase displacement. It is known that the entry capillary pressure is rate dependent such that the inertia forces would enhance entry of the non-wetting phase into the pores. More importantly the entry capillary pressure is wettability dependent.

Critical Role of the Immobile Zone in Non-Fickian Two-Phase Transport: A New Paradigm.

Using a visualization setup, we characterized the solute transport in a micromodel filled with two fluid phases using direct, real-time imaging. By processing the time series of images of solute transport (dispersion) in a two fluid-phase filled micromodel, we directly delineated the change of transport hydrodynamics as a result of fluid-phase occupancy. We found that, in the water saturation range of 0.