Imperial College London

ProfessorMartinBlunt

Faculty of EngineeringDepartment 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

@article{Gao:2017:10.1002/2017WR021736,
author = {Gao, Y and Lin, Q and Bijeljic, B and Blunt, MJ},
doi = {10.1002/2017WR021736},
journal = {Water Resources Research},
pages = {10274--10292},
title = {X-ray Microtomography of Intermittency in Multiphase Flow at Steady State Using a Differential Imaging Method},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017WR021736},
volume = {53},
year = {2017}
}

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB - We imaged the steady state flow of brine and decane in Bentheimer sandstone. We devised an experimental method based on differential imaging to examine how flow rate impacts impact the pore-scale distribution of fluids during coinjection. This allows us to elucidate flow regimes (connected, or breakup of the nonwetting phase path ways) for a range of fractional flows at two capillary numbers, Ca, namely 3.0 × 10 −7 and 7.5 × 10 −6 . At the lower Ca, for a fixed fractional flow, the two phases appear to flow in connected unchanging subnetworks of the pore space, consistent with conventional theory. At the higher Ca, we observed that a significant fraction of the pore space contained sometimes oil and sometimes brine during the 1 h scan: this intermittent occupancy, which was interpreted as regions of the pore space that contained both fluid phases for some time, is necessary to explain the flow and dynamic connectivity of the oil phase; pathways of always oil-filled portions of the void space did not span the core. This phase was segmented from the differential image between the 30 wt % KI brine image and the scans taken at each fractional flow. Using the grey scale histogram distribution of the raw images, the oil proportion in the intermittent phase was calculated. The pressure drops at each fractional flow at low and high flow rates were measured by high-precision differential pressure sensors. The relative permeabilities and fractional flow obtained by our experiment at the mm-scale compare well with data from the literature on cm-scale samples.
AU - Gao,Y
AU - Lin,Q
AU - Bijeljic,B
AU - Blunt,MJ
DO - 10.1002/2017WR021736
EP - 10292
PY - 2017///
SN - 0043-1397
SP - 10274
TI - X-ray Microtomography of Intermittency in Multiphase Flow at Steady State Using a Differential Imaging Method
T2 - Water Resources Research
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017WR021736
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/56572
VL - 53
ER -