Abstract

Foaming issues are encountered at the stages in crude oil production, transportation, processing, especially in chemical flooding enhanced oil recovery (EOR) oilfields. These accumulated foams would cause a lot of trouble for downstream operation. The destruction of foams under ultrasonic has been increasingly paying attention in the background of green oilfield development. This study focuses on the decay kinetic characteristics of alkaline-surfactant-polymer-strengthened foams under the ultrasonic standing wave. The performance of the diverse foams was characterized. A decay kinetic model incorporating the energy correlation was developed and validated. The factors that affect the decay kinetic characteristics were discussed. The results indicated that the collapse rate and the collapse volume fraction decreased when the foam size decreased, the gas-liquid ratio decreased and the surface tension increased. Ultrasonic standing wave parameters have a significant impact on the decay behavior of the foam. Both the ultrasonic frequency and ultrasonic amplitude were increased by 50%, the collapse volume fraction of foams increased by about 1.25 times in the identical irradiation time. The relative deviation between the measured results and the model prediction was less than 10%. The potential collapse mechanism was also explained using the principle of energy correlation of foam surface. This study is not only beneficial to provide a robust and rigorous way to defoam of produced liquid in the alkaline/surfactant/polymer (ASP) flooding EOR process but also meaningful to well understand the decay process of oil-based foams.