GENERALIZED ENTERING COEFFICIENTS - A CRITERION FOR FOAM STABILITY AGAINST OIL IN POROUS-MEDIA

The unique mobility-control properties of foam in porous media make it an attractive choice as an injection fluid for enhanced oil recovery. Unfortunately, in many cases oil has a major destabilizing effect on foam. Therefore, it is important to understand how oil destabilizes foam and what surfactant properties lead to increased stability against oil. To explain the stability of foam in porous media in the presence of oil, we generalize the ideas of spreading and entering behavior using Frumkin-Derjaguin wetting theory. This formulation overcomes the inherent deficiencies in the classical spreading and entering coefficients used to explain foam stability against oil. We find that oil-tolerant foam can be produced by making the oil surface ''water wet''. To test our theoretical ideas, we measure foam-flow resistance through 45-70 mum glass beadpacks, surface and interfacial tensions, and disjoining pressure isotherms for foam and pseudoemulsion films for a variety of surfactant/oil systems. Most notably, we measure pseudoemulsion-film disjoining pressure isotherms for the first time and directly establish that pseudoemulsion film stability controls the stability of the foam in the systems we tested. Morever, we demonstrate the correspondence between stable pseudoemulsion films, negative entering behavior, and oil-tolerant foams.