The Kinetics of Polymer Adsorption in Transport Through Porous Media: Basic Theory
4 affiliations
- 1Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
- 2New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
- 3University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58202, USA
- 4SNF Floerger, 42160 Andrézieux-Bouthéon, France
Abstract
A polymer transport and kinetic adsorption model is developed and applied to assist in the understanding of some recent results in polymer flow through porous media. The coupled equations in dimensionless form show that the system is governed by 3 dimensionless numbers, 2 of which are important: the Adsorption number (NAd) and the adsorption Damköhler number (NDa-A). This leads to a wide range of behaviours in terms of the polymer effluent profiles, which are in broad qualitative agreement with experimental observations. The hypothesis is that it is the kinetics of the system (principally NDa-A) that is strongly controlling the experimental observations. The model also predicts that the way to establish if this is true is to conduct a polymer core flood including “shut-in” stages where flow is stopped, then resumed after some period of time, depending on the kinetic adsorption timescale. Preliminary experiments support this, and a following paper will present these experimental results directly simulated using our model.
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BibTeX
@article{sorbie2026kinetics,
title = {{The Kinetics of Polymer Adsorption in Transport Through Porous Media: Basic Theory}},
author = {Kenneth S. Sorbie and Randall S. Seright and Alan Beteta and Dongmei Wang and Celia Melo da Silva},
journal = {Polymers},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.3390/polym18192394},
url = {https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC13666976},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - The Kinetics of Polymer Adsorption in Transport Through Porous Media: Basic Theory
AU - Kenneth S. Sorbie
AU - Randall S. Seright
AU - Alan Beteta
AU - Dongmei Wang
AU - Celia Melo da Silva
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
JO - Polymers
DO - 10.3390/polym18192394
UR - https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC13666976
AB - A polymer transport and kinetic adsorption model is developed and applied to assist in the understanding of some recent results in polymer flow through porous media. The coupled equations in dimensionless form show that the system is governed by 3 dimensionless numbers, 2 of which are important: the Adsorption number (NAd) and the adsorption Damköhler number (NDa-A). This leads to a wide range of behaviours in terms of the polymer effluent profiles, which are in broad qualitative agreement with experimental observations. The hypothesis is that it is the kinetics of the system (principally NDa-A) that is strongly controlling the experimental observations. The model also predicts that the way to establish if this is true is to conduct a polymer core flood including “shut-in” stages where flow is stopped, then resumed after some period of time, depending on the kinetic adsorption timescale. Preliminary experiments support this, and a following paper will present these experimental results directly simulated using our model.
SN - 2073-4360
ER -