Study of the effect of capillary pressure on the permeability of porous media embedded with a fractal-like tree network

Abstract

In this paper, the analytical expressions for permeability of (both saturated and unsaturated) porous media embedded with a fractal-like tree network are presented based on fractal theory and technique when the capillary pressure is taken into account. Both the dimensionless effective permeability and the relative permeability of the composites, which are defined as porous media embedded with a fractal-like tree network in this work, are derived and found to be a function of saturation, the capillary pressure and microstructural parameters of the networks. The relative permeabilities predicted by the present fractal model are compared with the available experimental data and a fair agreement between them is found.