Dr. Anand Yethiraj, CAP Colloquium

Fri. Mar. 26 12:30 PM - Fri. Mar. 26 01:20 PM
Contact: Andrea Wiebe
Location: via Zoom

CAP Speaker, Dr. Anand Yethiraj, Professor

University of Newfoundland, St. John's

 

Using the physics of bubbles to squeeze out more oil

If one must drill for oil, then at least the extraction process should be as efficient as possible. Yet, the technology for extracting crude oil from reservoirs beneath the ground involves an inherently unstable step: that is, the pumping of the less viscous water into a more viscous medium. This results in the “viscous fingering instability” which leaves islands of unrecoverable oil behind. 

In this talk, you will see an early examination of the stability (in saline, reservoir conditions) of foams of bubbles which can suppress this instability. As it turns out, studying foam collapse is a very interesting experimental physics problem! It involves the construction of a novel imaging setup to study the foam simultaneously on the macroscopic scale and the bubble scale, and the automation of the analysis to enable studies that span days instead of minutes. 

 

Missed the talk? View it here: https://uwcloud.uwinnipeg.ca/s/JdrZJbinfMLTSje