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Highlights: [•] New mechanism was proposed for asphaltene deposition and permeability reduction. [•] Existing mechanism(s) was modified based on experimental results. [•] Existing analytical model was modified to better match the experimental data. [•] The modified model predicts the experimental data more accurately. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• A model of droplet breakup at a high dispersed phase holdup is developed. • Droplet fluctuation velocities are calculated by kinetic theory of granular media. • The breakup model developed is incorporated into the STARCCM+® CFD code. • The breakup model is validated using experimental data obtained in a Couette device. A model of droplet breakup during formation of a dense emulsion in a turbulent flow is developed. Droplet fluctuation velocities, eventually causing breakup, are determined using the kinetic theory of granular media. For model validation, an experimental Couette device is employed. The dispersed and continuous phases are deionized water and mineral oil, respectively. Droplet coalescence is suppressed by a surfactant. A series of experiments is conducted for different Couette device rotation speeds and water holdups. For identification of the major droplet breakup model parameter, the critical Weber number, droplet dispersion in the Couette device is modelled by CFD-population balance A-MuSiG method implemented into the developer's version of the Simcenter STAR-CCM+® commercial code. A good agreement between the computational and experimental data is obtained for the dispersed phase holdups in the range of 10–30%, commonly encountered in production logging of oil and water producing wells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spontaneous Imbibition (SI) is in particular a very important mechanism for oil and gas recovery from matrix blocks in naturally fractured reservoirs. An analytical solution to the one-dimensional co-current spontaneous imbibition (COCSI) problem was proposed by Schmid et al. (2011). On the basis of this analytical solution, a set of scaling equations as well as a simplified one were developed for the COCSI process (Mirzaei-Paiaman and Masihi, 2014). The objective of this study was to validate these scaling equations using 12 one-dimensional COCSI experiments. To accommodate for multi-dimensionality of the COCSI process, a shape factor was proposed and incorporated into the one-dimensional scaling equations to make them applicable for any matrix size, shape and boundary conditions. The resulted scaling equations were validated through the use of data associated with 17 multi-dimensional water-oil COCSI experiments. The necessity of accounting for matrix anisotropy in the proposed scaling equations was also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]