A Study of Wettability and Permeability Change Caused by Adsorption of Nanometer Structured Polysilicon on the Surface of Porous Media

Abstract A nanometer (10−9m) structured particle material, generally so defined that the diameter of the particle is no more than 100nm, has some special physical efficacy in its surface, small size and other properties. One kind of polysilicon with sizes ranging from 10~500nm, and considered as nanometer or sub nanometer sized powder, was used in oilfields to enhance water injection by changing wettability of porous media. The mechanism of enhancing water injection is through improving relative permeability of the water-phase by changing wettability induced by adsorption of polysilicon on the porous surface of sandstone. On the other hand, the adsorption on the porous surface and plugging at the small pore throats of the polysilicon may lead to reduction in porosity and absolute permeability (K) of porous media for pore sizes from 100 to 1000,000nm. Thus the degree of success in well treatment is determined by the improvement of effective permeability of the water-phase. In this paper a mathematical model, which was combined with the study of experiments in the laboratory, is presented and a simulator is developed to simulate water injection dynamics under the conditions of polysilicon injection. The simulator can accurately simulate the process of migration and adsorption in the pore bodies and blocking at the pore throat of the polysilicon in the sandstone. A series of numerical simulation runs was conducted to study the effect of a wide range of parameters, such as the sandstone with different permeabilities, concentration of the polysilicon, injection volumes, and others. The effective permeabilities of the waterphase measured by a number of core flooding experiments are matched well by the numerical results. Since April 2000, nine well treatments with solvent slugs of suspended polysilicon particles in several oilfields in China was shown to be successful and the average injection rate increased 5 times after treatments.