CFD Simulation and Experimental Study on the Impact of RPB Structure on the Dissolution of Non-Newtonian Polymer Fluids

Polymer flooding is one of the effective technologies for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in offshore oilfields. However, traditional polymer maturation tanks are large in volume, heavy in weight, and slow in dissolution rate, limiting their application in offshore fields. In this study, Higee technology was adopted, with a rotating packed bed (RPB) as the core device. Combined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and experiments, the effects of rotation speed, polymer concentration and number of wire mesh layers on the dispersion and dissolution behavior of polyacrylamide (HPAM) were analyzed. The results show that the higher the rotation speed, the better the HPAM dispersion effect, but the flow field stability decreases; a high-concentration polymer has a high viscosity and a poor flow capacity, requiring a longer time to achieve the ideal dispersion result; increasing the number of wire mesh layers can improve the uniformity of polymer distribution but will reduce flow capacity, among which the seven-layer wire mesh packing achieves the optimal balance between dissolution performance and flow capacity. Verification through small-scale RPB experiments shows that the HPAM dissolution effects of the seven-layer and nine-layer wire mesh structures are generally equivalent, but the seven-layer structure has a higher viscosity retention rate (93.6~95%), which has more advantages in practical field applications and validates the simulation results. This study optimizes the number of wire mesh layers and rotation speed range of RPB, providing theoretical and technical references for the development of large-scale industrial polymer solution preparation facilities without maturation tanks.