Study on frequency optimization and mechanism of ultrasonic waves assisting water flooding in low-permeability reservoirs

Water flooding is one of widely used technique to improve oil recovery from conventional reservoirs, but its performance in low-permeability reservoirs is barely satisfactory. Besides adding chemical agents, ultrasonic wave is an effective and environmental-friendly strategy to assist in water flooding for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in unconventional reservoirs. The acoustic frequency plays a dominating role in the EOR performance of ultrasonic wave and is usually optimized through a series of time-consuming laboratory experiments. Hence, this study proposes an unsupervised learning method to group low-permeability cores in terms of permeability, porosity and wettability. This grouping algorithm succeeds to classify the 100 natural cores adopted in this study into five categories and the water flooding experiment certificates the accuracy and reliability of the clustering results. It is proved that ultrasonic waves can further improve the oil recovery yielded by water-flooding, especially in the oil-wet and weakly water-wet low-permeability cores. Furthermore, we investigated the EOR mechanism of ultrasonic waves in the low-permeability reservoir via scanning electron microscope observation, infrared characterization, interfacial tension and oil viscosity measurement. Although ultrasonic waves cannot ameliorate the components of light oil as dramatically as those of heavy oil, such compound changes still contribute to the oil viscosity and oil-water interfacial tension reductions. More importantly, ultrasonic waves may modify the micromorphology of low-permeability cores and improve the pore connectivity.