An OpenFOAM based solver for three-phase flow in porous media incorporating foam effects
Description
Foam injection is a promising alternative for enhanced oil recovery strategies, as it can improve sweep efficiency in gas-assisted processes. Accurately predicting multiphase foam flow in porous media, however, remains challenging, and existing modeling approaches continue to evolve as new foam modeling insights and numerical strategies emerge. In this work, we develop ImpesFOAM, a computational framework for three-phase flow incorporating effects of foam using {Finite volume method} (FVM) formulation within the OpenFOAM framework and {IMplicit-Pressure Explicit-Saturation} (IMPES) method. Two foam formulations are incorporated: an implicit-texture model that captures dry-out, oil effects, and surfactant concentration, and a mechanistic population-balance model describing bubble generation and coalescence. Surfactant transport in the aqueous phase is modeled through an additional conservation equation that includes adsorption effects. The object-oriented high-level programming design of OpenFOAM facilitates the link between mathematical modeling and computational implementation, which makes the developed solver more flexible for further foam model implementations. The solver is validated against a comprehensive set of benchmark cases for two and three-phase flow, with and without foam, designed to isolate gravity, capillary pressure, well-driven flow with source and sink terms, and surfactant transport mechanisms. The results show good agreement with analytical, numerical, and experimental results. Moreover, through two three-dimensional field application cases, we demonstrate that foam-assisted {Enhanced Oil Recovery} (EOR) ultimately yields more economically attractive outcomes, including a substantial increase in oil recovery factor and a decrease in the gas-oil ratio production.