A New Scaling Relationship for Water Imbibition into the Matrix: Considering Fracture Flow

Abstract

Spontaneous imbibition of water into the matrix is the most important mechanism for oil recovery in water wet fractured porous media. If the water is in contact with matrix and it is not flowing, the process is called static imbibition. The effect of rock and fluid properties, and boundary conditions on static imbibition are studied and formulated for scaling of the laboratory data to the reservoir scale. In reality, there is a continuous flow in a fracture; incorporating the effect of fracture flow into the scaling formulations is an unresolved issue in the modeling of the capillary imbibition recovery from the matrix. In this article, a new mathematical equation is developed to scale recovery data under fracture flow. Experimental data reported in the literature are used to validate the new dimensionless time. The results show the ability of the equation for scaling of the imbibition data.