Transport and Retention of Concentrated Oil-in-Water Emulsions in Porous Media

Oil-in-water emulsions are routinely used in subsurface remediation. In these applications, high oil loadings present a challenge to remedial design as mechanistic insights into transport and retention of concentrated emulsions is limited. Column experiments were designed to examine emulsion transport and retention over a range of input concentrations (1.3-23% wt). Droplet breakthrough and retention data from low concentration experiments were successfully described by existing particle transport models. These models, however, failed to capture droplet transport in more concentrated systems. At high oil fraction, breakthrough curves exhibited an early fall at the end of the emulsion pulse and extending tailing. Irrespective of input concentration, all retention profiles displayed hyper-exponential behavior. Here, we extended existing model formulations to include the additional mixing processes occurring when at high oil concentrations-with focus on the influence of deposited mass and viscous instabilities. The resulting model was parametrized with low concentration data and can successfully predict concentrated emulsion transport and retention. The role of retained mass and viscous instabilities on mixing conditions can also be applied more broadly to systems with temporal or spatially variant water saturation or when viscosity contrasts exist between fluids.