Eects of viscoelastic polymer solutions on the oil extraction from dead ends

This research deals with the numerical simulation of two viscoelastic uids ow in an open capillary of a reservoir. Oldroyd-B and Leonov models have been used to describe the rheological behavior of polymer solutions. The nite volume method on a structured and collocated grid has been used for discretization of the governing equations. The discrete elastic viscous stress splitting technique has also been used. The steady state, isothermal and incompressible uids past through a two dimensional micropore have been considered. The numerical method has been validated through the comparison of numerical results by the analytical solutions of Oldroyd-B uid ow through a planar channel. The eects of uid characteristics and operating conditions on the oil sweeping from the dead ends are investigated. The contours of velocity, stream function and pressure are presented, and the swept depth is calculated. The presented results show that with increasing the Weissenberg number the swept depth of ooding uid in the dead ends increases considerably. However, in the studied range, the Reynolds number does not have any signicant eect on the sweep eciency. The results also show that the swept depth in the case of viscoelastic uids is more than the Newtonian and generalized Newtonian uids.