Applications of critical path analysis to uniform grain packings with narrow conductance distributions: II. Water relative permeability

Abstract

Accurate estimation of water relative permeability has been of great interest in various research areas because of its broad applications in soil physics and hydrology as well as oil and gas production and recovery. Critical path analysis (CPA), a promising technique from statistical physics, is well known to be applicable to heterogeneous media with broad conductance or pore size distribution (PSD). By heterogeneity, we mean variations in the geometrical properties of pore space. In this study, we demonstrate that CPA is also applicable to packings of spheres of the same size, known as relatively homogeneous porous media. More specifically, we apply CPA to model water relative permeability (krw) in mono-sized sphere packs whose PSDs are fairly narrow. We estimate the krw from (1) the PSD and (2) the PSD and saturation-dependent electrical conductivity (σr) for both drainage and imbibition processes. We show that the PSD of mono-sized sphere packs approximately follows the log-normal probability density function. Comparison with numerical simulations indicate that both the imbibition and drainage krw are estimated from the PSD and σr data more accurately than those from the PSD. We show that CPA can estimate krw in mono-sized sphere packs precisely.