(154e) Understanding Foam Flows – Application to Gas-Dominated Flow Systems

Foam flows play significant roles in the recovery and production of oil and gas, for example, cutting and transporting with foam during drilling and flow from reservoirs during oil/gas recovery. Therefore, successful modeling of foam flows can benefit these processes involved in the upstream energy industry. For instance, a mechanistic understanding of foam flows in horizontal and/or vertical pipes can be applied for reliable prediction of the rate of gas and condensate production. Since foams exhibit strong elasticity, reliable measurements and predictions of the mechanical/rheological properties of foams are invaluable for developing models, which are crucial in predicting the flow response of foams. In this talk, a modern experimental technique, “Stokes experiment with foam”, is shown to be a reliable technique for measuring the elastic modulus of liquid foams. Moreover, this study shows that wall effect must be taken into account for accurately modeling the foam flows near pipeline walls due to a reduction of the elastic modulus for foam flows near walls. The conclusions drawn from this study are also equivalently valid for dense emulsion flows, e.g. oil/water, and systems of even three fluids, e.g. oil, water, and gas.