An Extended Viscoelastic Model for Predicting Polymer Apparent Viscosity at Different Shear Rates

Polymer flooding is one of the most commonly used chemical EOR methods. Conventionally, this technique was believed to improve macroscopic sweep efficiency by sweeping only bypassed oil. Nevertheless, recently it has been found that polymers exhibiting viscoelastic behavior in the porous medium can also improve microscopic displacement efficiency resulting in higher additional oil recovery. Therefore, an accurate prediction of the complex rheological response of polymers is crucial to obtain a proper estimation of incremental oil to polymer flooding. In this paper, a novel viscoelastic model is proposed to comprehensively analyze the polymer rheological behavior in porous media. The proposed viscoelastic model is considered an extension of the unified apparent viscosity model provided in the literature and is termed as extended unified viscosity model (E-UVM). The main advantage of the proposed model is its ability to capture the polymer mechanical degradation at ultimate shear rates primarily observed near wellbores. Furthermore, the fitting parameters used in the model were correlated to rock and polymer properties, significantly reducing the need for time-consuming coreflooding tests for future polymer screening works. Moreover, the extended viscoelastic model was implemented in MATLAB Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST) and verified against the original shear model existing in the simulator. It was found that implementing the viscosity model in MRST might be more accurate and practical than the original method. In addition, the comparison between various viscosity models proposed earlier and E-UVM in the reservoir simulator revealed that the latter model could yield more reliable oil recovery predictions since it accommodates the mechanical degradation of polymers. This study presents a novel viscoelastic model that is more comprehensive and representative as opposed to other models in the literature.