Ageing of random porous media following fluid deterministic displacement, freezing, thawing

Abstract

This paper introduces and investigates a simple model of random porous media degradation via several fluid displacing, freezing, and thawing cycles. The fluid transport is based on the deterministic method. The result shows that the topology and the geometry of porous media have a strong effect on displacement processes. The cluster size of the viscous fingering (VF) pattern in the percolation cluster increases with the increase of iteration parameter n. When iteration parameter $$n \ge 10$$ , the VF pattern does not change with n. When $$r \to 1$$ and $$n \ge 5$$ , the peak value of the distribution Nmat(r) increases as n increases; Nmat(r) is the normalized distribution of throat sizes after different displacement-damage but before the freezing. The distribution of throat size N(r) after displacement but before freezing damage, shows that the major change, after successive cycles, happens at r>0.9. The peak value of the distribution Ninv(r) reaches a maximum when $$n \ge 10$$ and r=1, where Ninv is the normalized distribution of the size of invaded throats for different iterations. This result is different from invasion percolation. The distribution of velocities normal to the interface of VF in the percolation cluster is also studied. When $$n \ge 10$$ , the scaling function distribution is very sharp. The sweep efficiency E increases along with the increasing of iteration parameter n and decreases with the network size L. And E has a minimum as L increases to the maximum size of the lattice. The VF pattern in the percolation cluster has one frozen zone and one active zone.