Imperial College London
Alternate

Dr Paula Alejandra Gago

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Earth Science & Engineering

 
 
 
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Contact

 

p.gago

 
 
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Location

 

Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Gago:2018:10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034003,
author = {Gago, PA and King, P and Muggeridge, A},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034003},
journal = {Physical Review Applied},
title = {Fractal growth model for estimating breakthrough time and sweep efficiency when waterflooding geologically heterogeneous rocks},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034003},
volume = {10},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - We describe a fast method for estimating flow through a porous medium with a heterogeneous permeability distribution. The main application is to contaminant transport in aquifers and recovery of oil by waterflooding, where such geological heterogeneities can result in regions of bypassed contaminants or oil. The extent of this bypassing is normally assessed by a numerical flow simulation that can take many hours of computer time. Ideally the impact of uncertainty in the geological description is then evaluated by the performing of many such simulations using different realizations of the permeability distribution. Obviously, a proper Monte Carlo evaluation may be impossible when the flow simulations are so computationally intensive. Consequently, methods from statistical mechanics, such as percolation theory and random walkers (such as diffusion-limited aggregation), have been proposed; however, these methods are limited to geological heterogeneities where the correlation lengths are smaller than the system size or to continuous permeability distributions. Here we describe a growth model that can be used to estimate the breakthrough time of the water (and hence the sweep efficiency) in most types of geologically heterogeneous rocks. We show how the model gives good estimates of the breakthrough time of water at the production well in a fraction of the time needed to perform a full flow simulation.
AU  - Gago,PA
AU  - King,P
AU  - Muggeridge,A
DO  - 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034003
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 2331-7019
TI  - Fractal growth model for estimating breakthrough time and sweep efficiency when waterflooding geologically heterogeneous rocks
T2  - Physical Review Applied
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034003
UR  - http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000443680000001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/63230
VL  - 10
ER  -
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