CHEMICAL and Biomedical ENGINEERING

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND Physical Sciences

Education

• Master in Exploration and Production, IFP School, Paris, France, 2002
• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 1996
• B.Sc. Physics, 1987, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela, 1987

Enhanced-Oil Recovery, Transport in Porous Media

My Research focuses on Enhanced-Oil Recovery (EOR) activities including screening methods for assisting decision-making on one hand. A combination of data mining and analytical simulation assists the creation of simplified decision spaces. Monitoring techniques for EOR operations such as time-lapse seismic and tracer tests are also of my interest. Uncertainty propagation and upscaling are two pillars of feasibility analysis for monitoring techniques. In recent years, I have been involved with experimental and modeling initiatives to investigate flow of dispersions (emulsions) through porous media. Observation of flow phenomena (jamming, drop breakup, etc.) in glass pore-throat models helps to formulate single-pore models as well as network models for these flows in porous media. While current simulation models do not account for some important phenomenology, planned modeling strategies such as Lattice-Boltzmann techniques will hopefully handle several of the most important events at the pore scale. This research focuses on understanding the flow mechanisms for the development of EOR and well-conformance strategies based on dispersions. The ultimate objective of this research is to create robust reservoir simulation models for dispersion flows.

1. F. A. V. Artola and V. Alvarado, Sensitivity Analysis of Gassmann's fluid substitution equations: Some implications in feasibility studies of time-lapse seismic reservoir monitoring, Journal of Applied Geophysics, 59, 47-62 (2006).
2. V. Alvarado, E.-M. Reich, Y. Yi, K. Potsch, Integration of a Risk Management Tool and an Analytical Simulator for Assisted Decision-Making in IOR, paper SPE 100217 presented at the SPE Europec/EAGE Annual Conference and Exhibition held in Vienna, Austria, 12-15 June 2006.
3. V. Alvarado, Scaling Behavior of a Convection-Dispersion Process in Hierarchical Networks, Physical Review E, 71, 036304, 2005.