Displacement Behaviour

This section will consider the behaviour of the reservoir fluids in the bulk of the reservoir, away from the wells, to describe what controls the displacement of fluids towards the wells. Understanding this behaviour is important when estimating the recovery factor for hydrocarbons, and the production forecast for both hydrocarbons and water. In Section 9.0, the behaviour of fluid flow at the wellbore will be considered this will influence the number of wells required for development, and the positioning of the wells. 

Introduction and Commercial Application Section 8.0 considered the dynamic behaviour in the reservoir, away from the influence of the wells. However, when the fluid flow comes under the influence of the pressure drop near the wellbore, the displacement may be altered by the local pressure distribution, giving rise to coning or cusping. These effects may encourage the production of unwanted fluids (e.g. water or gas instead of oil), and must be understood so that their negative input can be minimised. 

Corrosion protection of metals can take many fonns, one of which is passivation. As mentioned above, passivation is the fonnation of a thin protective film (most commonly oxide or hydrated oxide) on a metallic surface. Certain metals that are prone to passivation will fonn a thin oxide film that displaces the electrode potential of the metal by +0.5-2.0 V. The film severely hinders the difflision rate of metal ions from the electrode to tire solid-gas or solid-liquid interface, thus providing corrosion resistance. This decreased corrosion rate is best illustrated by anodic polarization curves, which are constructed by measuring the net current from an electrode into solution (the corrosion current) under an applied voltage. For passivable metals, the current will increase steadily with increasing voltage in the so-called active region until the passivating film fonns, at which point the current will rapidly decrease. This behaviour is characteristic of metals that are susceptible to passivation. 

Figure B2.5.4. Periodic displacement from equilibrium through a sound wave. The frill curve represents the temporal behaviour of pressure, temperature, and concentrations in die case of a very fast relaxation. The other lines illustrate various situations, with 03Xj according to table B2.5.1. 03 is the angular frequency of the sound wave and x is the chemical relaxation time. Adapted from [110].

The plastic behaviour of a material is usually measured by conducting a tensile test. Tensile testing equipment is standard in all engineering laboratories. Such equipment produces a load/displacement (F/u) curve for the material, which is then converted to a nominal stress/nominal strain, or cT l , curve (Fig. 8.10), where... 

Fig. 2.63 Force displacement behaviour of an elastic cracked plate...

A decisive factor for the physical behaviour of a composite is the adhesion efficiency at the boundaries between phases. In all theoretical models this adhesion is considered as perfect, assuming that the interfaces ensure continuity of stresses and displacements between phases, which should be different because of the proper nature of the constituents of composites. However, such conditions are hardly fulfilled in reality, leading to imperfect bonding between phases and variable adhesion between them. The introduction of the mesophase layer has as function to reconcile in a smooth way the differences on both sides of interfaces. 

The three-layer model, as previously mentioned, as well as the multi-layer model, were previously applied to study the behaviour, especially of fiber composites 3A). The three-layer model, based on the self-consistency of phases, gave relationships between stresses and displacements between phases, which, when solved, may give... 

It is now well established through studies in many laboratories throughout the world that foam injection shows considerable promise as an agent for the improvement of oil recovery from watered-out. porous media, and for the diversion of the flow of other oil-displacing fluids from more permeable paths into less permeable paths in the medium<1). Whilst the reasons for the effectiveness of foam for these purposes are not. completely clear, the explanation is thought to lie in the behaviour of the foam lamellae... 

The phantom network behaviour corresponding to volumeless chains which can freely interpenetrate one through the other and thus to unrestricted fluctuations of crosslinks should be approached in swollen systems or at high strains (proportionality to the Mooney-Rivlin constant C-j). For suppressed fluctuations of crosslinks, which then are displaced affinely with the strain, A for the small-strain modulus (equal to C1+C2) approaches unity. This situation should be characteristic of bulk systems. The constraints arising from interchain interactions important at low strains should be reflected in an increase of Aabove the phantom value and no extra Gee contribution to the modulus is necessary. The upper limit of the predicted equilibrium modulus corresponds therefore, A = 1. 

In a further development of the continuous chain model it has been shown that the viscoelastic and plastic behaviour, as manifested by the yielding phenomenon, creep and stress relaxation, can be satisfactorily described by the Eyring reduced time (ERT) model [10]. Creep in polymer fibres is brought about by the time-dependent shear deformation, resulting in a mutual displacement of adjacent chains [7-10]. As will be shown in Sect. 4, this process can be described by activated shear transitions with a distribution of activation energies. The ERT model will be used to derive the relationship that describes the strength of a polymer fibre as a function of the time and the temperature. 

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