Damage Characterization of Deep Bed Filtration From Pressure Measurements

Abstract

SummaryPermeability decline occurs during injection of sea or produced water, resulting in well impairment. Solid and liquid particles dispersed in the injected water are trapped by the porous medium and may significantly increase hydraulic resistance to the flow.We discuss a mathematical model for deep bed filtration containing two empirical parameters - the filtration and the formation damage coefficients. These parameters should be determined from laboratory coreflood tests by forcing water with particles to flow through core samples. A routine laboratory method determines the filtration coefficient with expensive and difficult particle-concentration measurements of the core effluent, and then the formation damage coefficient is determined from inexpensive and simple pressure-drop measurements.An alternative method would be to use solely pressure difference between the core ends. However, we proved in an earlier work that given pressure-drop data in seawater coreflood laboratory experiments, solving for the filtration and formation damage coefficients is an inverse problem that determines only a combination of these two parameters rather than each of them.A new method for the simultaneous determination of both coefficients is developed here. The method's new feature is using pressure data at an intermediate core point, supplementing pressure measurements at the core inlet and outlet. The proposed method furnishes unique values for the two coefficients, and the solution is stable with respect to small perturbations of the pressure data.In this work, the proposed method is used for analysis of laboratory test data on deep bed filtration. The values of filtration and formation damage coefficients are obtained for flow of solid and liquid particle dispersions in a number of different cores. Effects of particle type and porous media wettability on permeability decline are analyzed.