Transport in Porous Media, Vol.69, No.2, 159-174, 2007
Compositional gravity drainage 2: experimental measurements using an analog system
Gravity drainage with fluid phases that are not in chemical equilibrium is determined by the interplay of gravitational forces, capillary forces, and compositional effects. In Part 1, we obtained analytic solutions for capillary/gravity equilibrium for a three-component two-phase system with parallel tie lines, and were able to obtain the recovery and final component distributions for arbitrary initial and displacing phases Bond numbers. Here, we perform compositional drainage experiments using an analog brine/isopropanol/iso-octane system (with non-parallel tie lines) in which we measure the distributions of the components after 3 weeks of drainage and the total recovery of wetting phase. The results are compared to predictions using the capillary/gravity equilibrium (CGE) theory in Part 1, and also a solution for pure advection of two-phase, three-component mixtures. We find that for condensing drainages that CGE provides the best description of the drainage, and that for vaporizing drainages a pure advection model provides the best description. The reasons for differences can be understood in terms of the assumptions that are the basis for the CGE and pure advection models.
Keywords:gravity drainage;compositional displacement;interfacial tension;multicomponent;multiphase;capillary equilibrium;bond number;total recovery;experimental measurements