Research Projects

Crude oil has been one of the prime drivers of the energy ecosystem around the world for more than 100 years now. This oil, as well as natural gas, is typically found in reservoir rocks where they accumulate over millions of years and can be extracted through various techniques and technologies. As mankind succeeded in developing the technologies to extract oil from oil fields, we have extracted most of the easily available oil from the fields, leaving remnants embedded in hard rocks and difficult to extract. With the dwindling of oil reserves across the world coupled with its importance in aviation, naval, petrochemical, plastic and automotive industries (emergence of EVs have reduced the dependence in automobiles), it has become imperative to understand the flow phenomenon at the pore level during extraction and devise new ways to extract the trapped oil with the final objective to improve the recovery factor. In this project, we propose a comprehensive EXPERIMENTAL and NUMERICAL study on the pore level flow dynamics of multiphase flows during water flooding using the principles of Reservoir on a Chip (ROC). The pores structures in porous rocks will be replicated in a microfluidic chip using the technique of Delaunay triangulation. Experiments on water flooding will be conducted in the lab to get insight into the two-phase flow patterns as the oil is pushed out by the flooding water. The same flow phenomenon will be studies numerically using the multi-physics software COMSOL for further insights into the flow phenomena and spatial distribution of trapped (unrecovered) oil as a function of pore distribution structures. The results are expected to help in optimizing the flooding methods/patterns towards improved recovery. We also propose to use CO2, a lighter gas for flooding of the dead pores to release the trapped oil and improve the recovery factor. The CO2, in turn, will get trapped in the dead pores resulting in carbon capture and sequestration.