Combustión in situ: un estudio de reactores para representarla

Abstract

This work in here presented is the first step in the seeking of the knowledge about in-situ combustion technique for its reliable industrial use.

In the heavy oil recovery there is a technique that currently has a small commercial application because there is ignorance in the chemical phenomena that occurs in the reservoir. Then, to work in these aspects is a necessity to find a solution for the oil exploitable reserves decreasing problem around the world. The chemical study that the technique needs is the big stopping to technique’s high scale application because some important concepts like the kinetic or the oil behaviors in the technique development, are actually ignored and it has a huge impact in the reliable of the project and in the inversion’s safety.

This paper presents the selection among a large number of reactors one with the best operational and physical characteristics to represent an in-situ combustion model and the development of its mathematical mode in order to establish appropriate work conditions in the reactor. This is the plug fow reactor, PFR.

With a work in a laboratory scale and whit the attention put it on the chemistry of the technique, is possible to find the influence of the mass and energy transport phenomena and to know which is the kinetic reaction behavior. If all these concepts are apelied, it can be more easy the understanding and the scaling of the process is defined the technique understanding and the scale up process.

In this work a set of mathematic equations that determines the best conditions to the reactor’s operation, using design equation, mass balance, energy balance and mathematics relations used in the petroleum industry like Darcy’s Law. This set of mathematic equation is a function of the basic first order reaction so it can’t describe the real behavior of the system, but it is an approximation to the real representation.