A review on polymer, gas, surfactant and nanoparticle adsorption modeling in porous media

Adsorption is a rock surface phenomenon and has increasingly become popular, especially in particle-transport applications across many fields, which has drawn a substantial number of publications from the industry and academia in the last decade, with many review articles focused on adsorption of polymers, surfactants, gas, and nanoparticles in porous media with main applications in EOR. Both experimental and modeling approaches to understand and efficiently mimick the particle transport to solve pertinent problems associated with particle retention on surfaces are discussed. The governing mechanisms of adsorption and desorption constitute an area under active research as many models have been proposed but the physics has not been fully honored. Although adsorption/desorption process is a physical phenomenon and a reversible process resulting from inter-molecular and the intramolecular association between molecules and surfaces, modeling these phenomena requires molecular level understanding.