Effect of Temperature on Enhanced Oil Recovery from aTwo-Dimensional Porous Medium when Injecting Polyacrylamide Polymer Solution

Hot water injection is one of the common mechanisms to enhance the oil recovery from reservoirs. But, novel methods of enhanced oil recovery are used for oil recovery, and one of them is flooding polymeric solutions inside the reservoirs. The main purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the process of enhancing the recovery of viscose oil by injecting distilled water and polyacrylamide-based polymeric solution from a two-dimensional porous medium. In order to study the flow patterns during the injection of base fluid and polymer solution, injection of displacing fluids was performed at a constant flowrate of 0.4 mL/min. Also, to investigate the effect of injected fluid temperature on fluid-fluid displacement and enhanced oil recovery efficiency, displacing fluids were injected at temperatures of 25°C and 90°C. The results showed that by adding polyacrylamide to water, the viscosity of the displacing fluid increased significantly, which led to an increase in the capillary number, and enhanced oil recovery up to 65.2% when injected with 0.5%wt polyacrylamide at ambient temperature. Also, increasing the temperature and reducing the mobility ratio of displacing fluids and base oil, the efficiency of oil recovery by injecting 5000ppm polymer solution increased to 66.4%, which is the maximum rate of base oil recovery by injecting displacing fluids in present study.