A Study On Mixing Characteristics Of Static Mixers In Enhanced Oil Recovery

The mixing of polyacrylamide(PAM),surfactant and sodium hydroxide solution is a very important process in enhanced oil recovery.In the mixing process,special static mixers are needed to insure that the viscosity decreasing ratio of PAM water solution is less than 2%(wt%). The mixing characteristics PAM non-Newtonian fluid in static mixers were studied.The effects of flow rate and static mixer type on the viscosity decreasing ratio of 0.5%(wt) PAM water solution was investigated.The relations between pressure drop and Reynolds number for different PAM concentrations,static mixer types and the certain number of mixing element were obtained. The mixing performance of combination of online dynamic mixer and static mixer was investigated.The surfactant and sodium hydroxide solutions was premixed in online dynamic mixer then mixed with 0.5% (wt) PAM and water in static mixer.The combination mixer offers a higher mixing efficiency. The flow and concentration fields in a static mixer were numerically simulated by computational fluid dynamics(CFD) software package FLUENT 6.0.