Conferencia inaugural de los Seminarios del INTEC “Dr. Alberto E. Cassano”

La Dirección del INTEC invita a la Conferencia inaugural de los Seminarios del INTEC CONICET-UNL “Dr. Alberto E. Cassano”, los cuales se llevarán a cabo con una frecuencia quincenal.

Esta primera actividad tendrá lugar el miércoles 27 de agosto, a las 11.00, en el Auditorio CONICET Santa Fe del edificio Houssay II, Güemes 3450.

La conferencia será dictada en español.

Seminario INTEC "Dr. Alberto Cassano"
Título: “Foam improved oil recovery: Foams on the verge of a nervous breakdown”
Expositor: Prof. Paul Grassia, CEAS, University of Manchester, UK.

Resumen:
During improved oil recovery (IOR), gas may be introduced into a porous reservoir filled with surfactant solution in order to form foam. A model for the evolution of the resulting foam front known as `pressure-driven growth' is analysed. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is derived that shows that foam can propagate indefinitely into the reservoir without gravity override. Moreover, `pressure-driven growth' is shown to correspond to a special case of the more general `viscous froth' model. In particular, it is a singular limit of the viscous froth, corresponding to the elimination of a surface tension term, permitting sharp corners and kinks in the predicted shape of the front. Sharp corners tend to develop from concave regions of the front. The principal solution of interest has a convex front, however, so that although this solution itself has no sharp corners (except for some kinks that develop spuriously owing to errors in a numerical scheme), it is found nevertheless to exhibit milder singularities in front curvature, as the long-time asymptotic analytical solution makes clear. Numerical schemes for the evolving front shape which perform robustly (avoiding the development of spurious kinks) are also developed. Generalisations of this solution to geologically heterogeneous reservoirs should exhibit concavities and/or sharp corner singularities as an inherent part of their evolution: propagation of fronts containing such `inherent' singularities can be readily incorporated into these numerical.

Biografía breve del expositor:
1985--1989: BSc (matematics and physics) University of Western Australia
1990--1994: PhD (applied mathematics and theoretical physics) University of Cambridge
1994--1996: postdoc (physics) Universidad de Chile
1996--1998: postdoc (chemical engineering) Stanford University
1998-- : lecturer/senior lecturer (chemical engineering) University of Manchester
El Prof. Paul Grassia se encuentra actualmente visitando el INTEC (3 meses), específicamente el Grupo de Flujos con Superficies Libres y
Dinámica Interfacial (GFSLDI). Mayor información acerca del expositor en:

http://www.intec.santafe-conicet.gov.ar/es/servicios/noticias/91/index.html