Experimental Study on Resistance Characteristics of Oil-Water Two-Phase Flow in Channels with Micron Dimension

Experimental simulations were performed on the flow in pores of porous media to solve the problem of small pore and low oil recovery in low permeability oilfields.Experiments were conducted for the flow in two rectangular microchannels with 200 μm in width,and 1.8 μm and 4.1 μm in depth respectively.The characteristics of oil flow and oil-water two-phase flow with the oil fraction 10%-60% in volume were obtained using the digital microscopy video technology and the microfluidic testing technology.The experimental results indicate that for the two channels with 1.8 μm and 4.1 μm in depth,the friction factors for the oil flow are lower than theoretical values and vary linearly with Reynolds number.The experimental Poiseuille numbers are less than the predictions and the difference between them increases with the decrease in the microchannel size.Moreover,for the oil-water two-phase flow,the friction factor also varies linearly with Reynolds number but is higher or lower than the theoretical value at different oil fractions.In addition,the Poiseuille number generally decreases with the increase in the oil fraction but increases sharply when the oil fraction is 20% or 60%,showing that the change of the Poiseuille number with the oil fraction is affected significantly by the hydrophilic property of channel walls.