Experimental verification of flow mechanisms in layered systems

8 Experimental verification of flow mechanisms in layered systems 

In the planning of a field polymer flood, it would therefore not be necessary to carry out 2-D floods in order to reproduce the recovery mechanism if improved vertical sweep were the objective of the polymer flood. Numerical simulation would simply be used to investigate these mechanisms. However, it is interesting to study experimental results from scaled layered systems since certain issues can be illustrated in particularly instructive ways. For example, the fluid dynamics of viscous slug breakdown or the flow patterns in the placement of viscous polymer slugs can be visualised very directly using such experiments (Sorbie etal, 1990). 

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