Multiphase flow in Porous media

The understanding of immiscible multiphase flow in porous media is a major interest for oil and gas recovery in conventional reservoir. After the secondary oil recovery (water flood), the oil network becomes disconnected in the porous structure into ganglia. To understand how a single oil ganglion is being transported in such condition, we design an artificial porous media where we can tune the main parameters such as pore size, porosity, and connectivity, that we transfer into a microfluidic chip. Thanks to our design, we can push this oil ganglion with surfactant or polymer-based solutions and track it using high speed imaging technologies. We observed that the oil transport is achieved through several mechanisms: continuous transport, break up into droplets but also, under certain condition, coalescence of oil droplets. These dynamics leads to new understanding and perspectives for modelling the oil transport in porous medium.