Diffusion and Soret Coefficients Measurement for Improvement of Oil Recovery allowing the characterization of an entire reservoir using a reduced number of exploratory wells

Diffusive processes are ubiquitous in daily life and in natural processes and play a key role in the transformation and mixing of fluid mixtures. In this context, the term diffusion is used to describe the relative motion of a species with respect to the other and can be caused by a concentration (isothermal diffusion) or temperature (thermal diffusion) difference across the mixture or by a potential gradient (as sedimentation). A very peculiar natural laboratory where mixing processes in fluid mixtures have a high scientific and industrial interest is the one of oil reservoirs, where all the above-mentioned effects contribute to the distribution of the component of the mixture that forms crude oils. Among them, a role is played by thermal diffusion caused by temperature gradient that develops inside reservoirs. The prediction of hydrocarbon composition is an important factor that contributes to the reservoir's exploitation strategies. Since the cost of resources increases with depth, the oil companies are interested in reliable thermodynamical models that allow the characterization of an entire reservoir using a reduced number of exploratory wells. To better model the complex behavior of crude oils, a better prediction of the thermal diffusion or Soret effect could be included. To this extent, there is a need of an experimental determination of the diffusion and thermal diffusion coefficients of crude oils. This is the goal of the Diffusion and Soret Coefficients Measurement for Improvement of Oil Recovery (SODI-DSC) experiment. The experiment will be carried out at very low gravity level in order not to perturb the long duration processes and to be able to obtain reliable values that can be used in numerical models.