Understanding polymer retention in porous formations using microfluidics

Abstract

Understanding polymer transport through porous media is key to successful field implementations of polymer-based enhanced oil recovery (EOR) schemes. The proposed approach of integrating microfluidics and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy represents a novel approach to replicate polymer flow in porous formations and to obtain molecular scale visualization of polymer retention mechanisms. For the first time, we achieved direct visualizations of two polymer transport mechanisms: mechanical entrapment and hydrodynamic retention, that manifest at dynamic conditions.