Research on the reconstruction method of porous media using multiple-point geostatistics

Abstract

The pore structural characteristics have been the key to the studies on the mechanisms of fluids flow in porous media. With the development of experimental technology, the modern high-resolution equipments are capable of capturing pore structure images with a resolution of microns. But so far only 3D volume data of millimeter-scale rock samples can be obtained losslessly. It is necessary to explore the way of virtually reconstructing larger volume digital samples of porous media with the representative structural characteristics of the pore space. This paper proposes a reconstruction method of porous media using the structural characteristics captured by the data templates of multiple-point geostatistics. In this method, the probability of each structural characteristic of a pore space is acquired first, and then these characteristics are reproduced according to the probabilities to present the real structural characteristics in the reconstructed images. Our experimental results have shown that: (i) the deviation of LBM computed permeability respectively on the virtually reconstructed sandstone and the original sample is less than 1.2%; (ii) the reconstructed sandstone and the original sample have similar structural characteristics demonstrated by the variogram curves.