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Condensed Matter/Biophysics Seminars – Miguel Gonzalez (Aramco Americas)

Date October 19, 2020 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

From macro to micro (to nano): mechanical resonators at all scales for rheology sensing in oilfield fluids

Real-time monitoring of oilfield fluid rheology is of crucial importance for oil recovery. During various operations such as drilling, production, stimulation, and intervention, the rheology of the fluids being produced or injected into the well need to be monitored to ensure safe operation, or to optimize the process being carried out. However, reliably measuring their physical properties can still pose a great challenge when the fluids are part of a multiphase flow or are complex inhomogeneous fluids whose properties can vary continuously with parameters such as temperature, pressure, flow rates, and composition. While specialized commercial instruments that make comparable measurements can be found in other industries, fewer systems tailored to the oil and gas industry exist or are too costly and complex to deploy in every well. In this presentation, I will discuss two examples of viscosity/density sensing systems based on mechanically resonating devices customized to different measurement scenarios in the field. In the first example, I demonstrate a ruggedized tuning fork device for in-line measurements of viscosity and density of non-Newtonian fluids. This instrument is a robust permanent tool for surface installation with applications in quality assessment of drilling mud or other wellbore fluids such as fracturing fluids. I will also discuss techniques currently being explored to extract rheological information from the vibrational damping measured on the resonator. In the second example, I will discuss miniaturized resonators fabricated using micro/nano-machining techniques. These devices can be integrated into small-scale measurement platforms, either for downhole deployment or for lab-on-a-chip platforms useful in portable field viscometry systems.

Host: Yoonseok Lee

Details

Date:
October 19, 2020
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Categories:
,

Venue

Via Zoom