Imperial College London
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ProfessorMartinBlunt

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Chair in Flow in Porous Media
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 6500m.blunt Website

 
 
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Location

 

2.38ARoyal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Lin:2017:10.3997/2214-4609.201701683,
author = {Lin, Q and Bijeljic, B and Rieke, H and Blunt, M},
doi = {10.3997/2214-4609.201701683},
publisher = {European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers},
title = {Differential imaging of porous plate capillary drainage in laminated sandstone rock using X-ray micro-tomography},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3997/2214-4609.201701683},
year = {2017}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - The experimental determination of capillary pressure drainage curves at the pore scale is of vital importance for the mapping of reservoir fluid distribution. To fully characterize capillary drainage in a complex pore space, we design a differential imaging-based porous plate (DIPP) method using X-ray microtomography. For an exemplar mm-scale laminated sandstone microcore with a porous plate, we quantify the displacement from resolvable macropores and subresolution micropores. Nitrogen (N2) was injected as the nonwetting phase at a constant pressure while the porous plate prevented its escape. The measured porosity and capillary pressure at the imaged saturations agree well with helium measurements and experiments on larger core samples, while providing a pore-scale explanation of the fluid distribution. We observed that the majority of the brine was displaced by N2 in macropores at low capillary pressures, followed by a further brine displacement in micropores when capillary pressure increases. Furthermore, we were able to discern that brine predominantly remained within the subresolution micropores, such as regions of fine lamination. The capillary pressure curve for pressures ranging from 0 to 1151 kPa is provided from the image analysis compares well with the conventional porous plate method for a cm-scale core but was conducted over a period of 10 days rather than up to few months with the conventional porous plate method. Overall, we demonstrate the capability of our method to provide quantitative information on two-phase saturation in heterogeneous core samples for a wide range of capillary pressures even at scales smaller than the micro-CT resolution.
AU  - Lin,Q
AU  - Bijeljic,B
AU  - Rieke,H
AU  - Blunt,M
DO  - 10.3997/2214-4609.201701683
PB  - European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
PY  - 2017///
TI  - Differential imaging of porous plate capillary drainage in laminated sandstone rock using X-ray micro-tomography
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3997/2214-4609.201701683
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/53804
ER  -
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