A brief review on foam flow modeling through porous media

The gas injection mechanism is the common way to enhanced oil recovery of carbonate reservoirs. This mechanism brings some difficulties such as viscose fingering, gas override issues and etc. In order to tackle these problems, foam assisted mechanism is used. Although, there are various studies about foam flooding and foam transport modeling in literatures, the lack of a brief and informative study about foam process modeling, in which all the previous models are included, is obvious. Thus, a brief review of foam modeling through porous media is the aim of this work. In this study, foam definition and foam properties were described in details, properties such as critical micelle concentration, foam quality, viscosity, stability, surface tension, foam disjoining pressure, etc. Also, major foam dynamic processes; foam destruction, formation, and entrapment, were explained in this work. Furthermore, three different approaches for modeling foam-assisted process through porous media were reviewed; the empirical, semi-empirical, and mechanistic, and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach were discussed.