The Impact of Wettability on the Co-moving Velocity of Two-Fluid Flow in Porous Media

• Published in: Transport in porous media Vol. 151; no. 10-11; pp. 1967 - 1982
• Main Authors: Alzubaidi, Fatimah, McClure, James E., Pedersen, Håkon, Hansen, Alex, Berg, Carl Fredrik, Mostaghimi, Peyman, Armstrong, Ryan T.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-09-2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Civil Engineering; Classical and Continuum Physics; Constitutive equations; Constitutive relationships; Data analysis; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Fluid flow; Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; Hydrogeology; Hydrology/Water Resources; Impact analysis; Industrial Chemistry/Chemical Engineering; Inverse problems; Permeability; Porous media; Porous media flow; Velocity; Wettability; Wetting; Co-moving velocity; Wettability; Relative permeability; Multiphase flow; Digital rock
• ISSN: 0169-3913; 1573-1634
• DOI: 10.1007/s11242-024-02102-y

The impact of wettability on the co-moving velocity of two-fluid flow in porous media is analyzed herein. The co-moving velocity, developed by Roy et al. (Front Phys 8:4, 2022), is a novel representation of the flow behavior of two fluids through porous media. Our study aims to better understand the behavior of the co-moving velocity by analyzing simulation data under various wetting conditions. We analyzed 46 relative permeability curves based on the Lattice–Boltzmann color fluid model and two experimentally determined relative permeability curves. The analysis of the relative permeability data followed the methodology proposed by Roy et al. (Front Phys 8:4, 2022) to reconstruct a constitutive equation for the co-moving velocity. Surprisingly, the coefficients of the constitutive equation were found to be nearly the same for all wetting conditions. On the basis of these results, a simple approach was proposed to reconstruct the relative permeability of the oil phase using only the co-moving velocity relationship and the relative permeability of the water phase. This proposed method provides new information on the interdependence of the relative permeability curves, which has implications for the history matching of production data and the solution of the associated inverse problem. The research findings contribute to a better understanding of the impact of wettability on fluid flow in porous media and provide a practical approach for estimating relative permeability based on the co-moving velocity relationship, which has never been shown before.