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

@article{Foroughi:2020:10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302,
author = {Foroughi, S and Bijeljic, B and Lin, Q and Raeini, AQ and Blunt, MJ},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302},
journal = {Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics},
pages = {023302  1--023302  15},
title = {Pore-by-pore modeling, analysis, and prediction of two-phase flow in mixed-wet rocks},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302},
volume = {102},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - A pore-network model is an upscaled representation of the pore space and fluid displacement, which is used to simulate two-phase flow through porous media. We use the results of pore-scale imaging experiments to calibrate and validate our simulations, and specifically to find the pore-scale distribution of wettability. We employ energy balance to estimate an average, thermodynamic, contact angle in the model, which is used as the initial estimate of contact angle. We then adjust the contact angle of each pore to match the observed fluid configurations in the experiment as a nonlinear inverse problem. The proposed algorithm is implemented on two sets of steady state micro-computed-tomography experiments for water-wet and mixed-wet Bentheimer sandstone. As a result of the optimization, the pore-by-pore error between the model and experiment is decreased to less than that observed between repeat experiments on the same rock sample. After calibration and matching, the model predictions for capillary pressure and relative permeability are in good agreement with the experiments. The proposed algorithm leads to a distribution of contact angle around the thermodynamic contact angle. We show that the contact angle is spatially correlated over around 4 pore lengths, while larger pores tend to be more oil-wet. Using randomly assigned distributions of contact angle in the model results in poor predictions of relative permeability and capillary pressure, particularly for the mixed-wet case.
AU  - Foroughi,S
AU  - Bijeljic,B
AU  - Lin,Q
AU  - Raeini,AQ
AU  - Blunt,MJ
DO  - 10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302
EP  - 1
PY  - 2020///
SN  - 1539-3755
SP  - 023302
TI  - Pore-by-pore modeling, analysis, and prediction of two-phase flow in mixed-wet rocks
T2  - Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302
UR  - http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000557935600001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.023302
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/82401
VL  - 102
ER  -
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