Please note: We are currently experiencing some performance issues across the site, and some pages may be slow to load. We are working on restoring normal service soon. Importing new articles from Word documents is also currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

loading page

Wetting-phase relative permeability in multi-scale porous media
  • Behzad Ghanbarian
Behzad Ghanbarian
Geology Department, Kansas State University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile

Abstract

Modeling relative permeability in multi-scale rocks and fractured networks has broad applications to understanding oil production and recovery in reservoir formations. Natural porous media are typically composed of two domains; one incorporates macropores, while the other contains micropores. In the literature, numerous theoretic models have been developed based on the series-parallel tubes approach (Mualem, 1976; van Genuchten, 1980) to estimate wetting-phase relative permeability (krw) from pore size distribution or capillary pressure curve. In this study, we, however, invoke concepts from critical path analysis (CPA), a theoretical technique from statistical physics. CPA has been successfully used to model flow and transport in porous media (Hunt, 2001; Ghanbarian-Alavijeh and Hunt, 2012; Hunt et al., 2013; 2014; Ghanbarian et al., 2016; Ghanbarian and Hunt, 2017). We estimate the wetting-phase relative permeability from the measured capillary pressure curve using two methods: (1) critical path analysis (CPA), and (2) series-parallel tubes (vG-M). To evaluate these models, we use 26 experiments from the literature for which capillary pressure and wetting-phase relative permeability data were measured at 500 data point over a wide range of wetting-phase saturation (Sw). Results demonstrate that CPA estimates krw more precisely than vG-M. We show that accurate krw estimation by the CPA-based model needs precise characterization of capillary pressure curve and accurate calculation of the crossover point (Swx) separating the two domains.