• PhD in Chemical Engineering (July 2016 - Present)                    
  • Institute: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
  • Thesis Title: Characterization of reservoir flow properties by pore scale simultion and experiments   
  • Thesis Advisor: Prof. Vivek V. Buwa and Prof. Jyoti Phirani
• M.Tech in Energy Engineering (July 2014 – June 2016)
  • Institute: National Institute of Technology Trichy, Tamilnadu, India   
• B.E. in Chemical Engineering (July 2009 – June 2013)
  • Institute: University of Pune, Maharashtra, India  

• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Multiphase Flows through porous media
• Laser induced flourescence
• High speed imaging

• Ambekar A. S., Sivakumar R., Anantharaman N., Vivekenandan M., CFD simulation study of shell and tube heat exchangers with different baffle segment configurations. Applied Thermal Engineering. 2016 Sep 5;108:999-1007.

• Ambekar, A. S., Buwa V. V. and Phirani, J., Interface Dynamics during two phase flow in stratified porous medium, International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels and Minichannels (ICNMM 2018), Dubrovinik, Croatia.
• Ambekar, A. S., Phirani, J. and Buwa V. V., Pore-resolved Simulations of Two-Phase Flow through Porous Media, International Conference on Multiphase Flow (ICMF 2019), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• Ambekar, A. S., Ashraf, S. and Phirani, J.,  Dynamics of forced imbibition in interacting pores, ASME - JSME - KSME Joint Fluids Engineering Conference (AJKFluids 2019), American Society of Mechanical Engineers, San Francisco, USA.
• Ambekar, A. S. and Buwa, V.V., Pore-resolved Two-Phase Flow in a Pseudo-3D Porous Medium: Volume of Fluid Simulations and Experimental Validation, ISHMT-ASTFE Heat and Mass Transfer Conference (IHMTC 2019), IIT Roorkee, India.

Water-flooding of oil reservoirs is the most popular secondary oil recovery process. It accounts for 25 to 30 % of total oil recovery.  In this process pressurized water is injected from the injection well into the oil reservoir and oil is recovered from the production well.  Upstream oil industry use reservoir scale simulations to predict oil production. These simulations require several reservoir properties, (e.g.. porosity and permeability) fluid properties (e.g., viscosity and interfacial tension) and interaction flow properties (e.g., relative permeability) as input parameters to predict oil recovery. Relative permeability data is generally generated from core flooding experiments of very small rock samples, ignoring the heterogeneous structure of reservoir rock. For accurate prediction of oil recovery, it is necessary to determine effect of heterogeneity on oil-water relative permeability.

Oil-water relative permeability is a function of local saturation. Measurements of dynamics of local saturation in a reservoir is challenging as the reservoir is opaque in nature.  Here, we mimic porous media using refractive index matched solids and liquids to measure local saturation using high speed imaging and laser induced fluorescence (LIF) at pore-scale. This pore-scale phenomenon of water-flooding will be simulated using Volume of fluid (VOF) model and validated by the LIF experiments. The pore-scale pressure data generated by VOF simulations will be used to determine the macroscopic relative permeability by appropriate upscaling. This macroscopic relative permeability would be further verified using conventional core flooding experiments.

Core flooding experimental setup used to determine oil-water relative permeability