Identification of local contact angle distribution inside a porous medium from an inverse optimization procedure

Abstract

Wettability characterization of a porous material has been mainly addressed so far in terms of an average contact angle. Here, a methodology is proposed to determine the contact angle spatial distribution of the medium in a statistical sense and the hydrophilic pore fraction, assuming the contact angle to take binary values. This is achieved by means of a minimization procedure on the relative permeability and capillary pressure curves with an inverse method based on pore network model and genetic and hill climbing algorithms.