Experiments on Flow of Fluids through Sands

Abstract

The measurement of the rate of flow of liquids through sands dates back to1856, when H. d' Arcy, a French physicist, carried out his classic experimentson the flow of water through sand layers. The earliest recorded data onrelationships of pressure to flow of fluids through porous rocks in thiscountry are those of Newell in 1885. The first comprehensive studies of flowwere made in 1898 by King, who measured the rate of flow of water and airthrough consolidated and unconsolidated sands and published the results. From1900 to 1920 there appears to have been little interest in permeability. In 1920 the increase in demand for oil led the U. S. Bureau of Mines to begin aseries of experiments to determine subsurface relationships of oil and waterand the characteristics of their flow. Mills studied the relationship of flowof liquids to texture and structure of the sands, and Melcher in 1925 made aquantitative study of effect of changes in pressure on rate of flow of crudeoil through Oklahoma oil sands. Since 1930 the importance of flow measurementsto production of oil and gas has been emphasized by a large number of excellentinvestigations. Among these the works of Fettke, Barb, Cloud., Nutting, Botset, Nevin, Tickell, Fancher, Lewis and Barnes, Moore, Schilthuis and Hurst, andWyckoff, Botset and Muskat have contributed much to our knowledge of thetechnique of permeability measurements and to the laws of liquid and gas flowthrough porous sands. The application of their work has led to theestablishment of laboratories for measuring the permeability and porosity ofoil sands by most of the large companies. All the investigations, except thoseof Wyckoff, Botset and Muskat, and Moore, Schilthuis and Hurst deal with linearflow; that is, flow in a more or less straight line through a givencrosssectional area of sand.