Porous cores for modeling of oil recovery

Different methods of increasing recovery are now being used; in one of them, the oil is pressed out of porous parent rocks by pumping water with fixed surface tension and viscosity into the pools. The optimum values of these indexes are economically more advantageously determined on model ceramic samples with characteristics close to petroleum-containing sandstones. It was necessary to prepare cyclindrical cores 200 and 400 mm long with air permeability of 0.05-0.1, 0.1-0.2, 0.2-0.3, 0.3-0.4, 0.5-0.6, and 0.6-0.7 darcy for conducting the studies. Some of the filters had to be inhomogeneous over the cross section, i.e., prepared from masses for different composition. The important difficulties in selection of core-forming technology should be noted. Attempts have been made to use samples fabricated from glass and quartz powders cemented with organic binders for modeling oil filtration processes. However, use of these cores is not rational, since the molecular nature of the surface of the solid phase does not totally correspond to the real conditions.