The effect of brine salinity on water-in-oil emulsion stability through droplet size distribution analysis: A case study

ABSTRACT

Water-in-oil emulsion usually forms during waterflooding in some heavy oil reservoirs. The composition and salinity of the injected water critically affect the w/o emulsion droplet size distribution, which control the emulsion stability and emulsion flow in porous media. The aim of the present work is to assess the effect of different sea water salinities on w/o emulsion stability through microscopic imaging. Therefore, w/o emulsions were prepared with different sea water samples, which were synthesized to resemble Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and North Sea water samples. The results showed that log-normal distribution function predicts very well the experimental data to track the emulsion droplet size distribution, and then it was used for the emulsion stability analysis. It was found that among the four emulsion samples, North Sea emulsion with the lowest NaCl and TDS concentration of 24.12 g/L and 34.44 g/L remained stable up to almost 24 hours, while Red sea emulsion with the highest NaCl and TDS concentration of 32.39 g/L and 41 g/L became unstable after 6-hour period. This indicated that as the brine concentration increases, the w/o emulsion droplets would be larger due to the higher rate of aggregation and coalescence, and the emulsion stability decreases.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Aggregation
• coalescence
• droplet size distribution
• microscopic photography
• stability
• w/o emulsion

Acknowledgments

The authors express their sincere appreciation to Mahsa Saljooghi, Narges Taheri, and Mohammad-Sadegh Moosapour for their technical assistance during the experiments.