Abstract
Due to the intricate structure of porous rocks, relationships between porosity or saturation and petrophysical transport properties classically used for reservoir evaluation and recovery strategies are either very complex or nonexistent. Thus, the pore network model extracted from the natural porous media is emphasized as a breakthrough to predict the fluid transport properties in the complex micro pore structure. This paper presents a modified method of extracting the equivalent pore network model from the three-dimensional micro computed tomography images based on the maximum ball algorithm. The partition of pore and throat are improved to avoid tremendous memory usage when extracting the equivalent pore network model. The porosity calculated by the extracted pore network model agrees well with the original sandstone sample. Instead of the Poiseuille’s law used in the original work, the Lattice-Boltzmann method is employed to simulate the single- and two- phase flow in the extracted pore network. Good agreements are acquired on relative permeability saturation curves of the simulation against the experiment results.
Highlights
Accurate acquisition of the micro structure and flow properties of porous media is of great importance in petroleum engineering, biomedical science, micro-electronics, and composites (Hilfer and Zauner 2011; Sanya et al 2014; Tagar et al 2016)
Based on the maximum ball algorithm, a modified method of extracting the equivalent pore network model from the three-dimensional micro computed tomography images is presented in this paper
Pore network model extraction algorithm A improved method of extracting the equivalent pore network model from the threedimensional micro computed tomography images based on the maximum ball algorithm (Silin and Patzek 2006) is proposed in this paper
Summary
Accurate acquisition of the micro structure and flow properties of porous media is of great importance in petroleum engineering, biomedical science, micro-electronics, and composites (Hilfer and Zauner 2011; Sanya et al 2014; Tagar et al 2016). The porescale modeling, where fluid displacement is simulated in a model of porous medium, has been used as a platform to study multi-phase flow at the pore scale. Based on the maximum ball algorithm, a modified method of extracting the equivalent pore network model from the three-dimensional micro computed tomography images is presented in this paper.
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