Abstract
Starfish is the first open-source software, specifically developed for simulation of capillary-dominated drainage/imbibition processes in the pore networks extracted from petroleum reservoir rock samples. Written in C++ using parallel computing methods, Starfish is fast and its bug fixes, modifications, and future developments will be simple. With comparing the predictions of Starfish to experimental results, it was found out that the Starfish predictions are in a good match with the experimentally obtained drainage/imbibition data.
Highlights
Pore-scale network modeling has been used as a tool for predicting transport properties of reservoir rock
Using pore-scale modeling, porosity, tortuosity, absolute permeability, relative permeabilities, capillary pressure, and resistivity of a rock sample can be predicted with considerable precision, without performing the time-consuming and expensive RCAL and SCAL experiments
Alongside pore-scale network modeling, there is another method called “Direct Modeling” that is capable of predicting transport properties
Summary
Pore-scale network modeling has been used as a tool for predicting transport properties of reservoir rock. Fatt (1956) was the first researcher who used network models for this purpose. In the forced imbibition process, pore body filling does not depend on the number of connected oil-filled throats, and the equations for piston-like displacement can be used. Just like the drainage process, if the non-wetting phase in an element or a cluster element loses its connection to the network outlet, it is trapped and the capillary pressure in that element(s) will not change anymore. The outflow rates of the water and oil phases are put in Darcy’s equation to get the effective and relative permeabilities This function is just like CalcRelPerm function, with the difference that it calculates the permeability of a single-phase fluid which completely saturates the network, or the “absolute permeability”. In other parallelizable parts of the code, OpenMP API was adopted
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