Newly developed high-speed, synchrotron-based X-ray computed microtomography enabled us to directly image pore-scale displacement events in porous rock in real time. Common approaches to modeling macroscopic fluid behavior are phenomenological, have many shortcomings, and lack consistent links to elementary porescale displacement processes, such as Haines jumps and snap-off. Unlike the common singular pore jump paradigm based on observations of restricted artificial capillaries, we found that Haines jumps typically cascade through 10-20 geometrically defined pores per event, accounting for 64% of the energy dissipation. Real-time imaging provided a more detailed fundamental understanding of the elementary processes in porous media, such as hysteresis, snapoff, and nonwetting phase entrapment, and it opens the way for a rigorous process for upscaling based on thermodynamic models.hydrology | oil recovery | multiphase flow
During imbibition, initially connected oil is displaced until it is trapped as immobile clusters. While initial and final states have been well described before, here we image the dynamic transient process in a sandstone rock using fast synchrotron‐based X‐ray computed microtomography. Wetting film swelling and subsequent snap off, at unusually high saturation, decreases nonwetting phase connectivity, which leads to nonwetting phase fragmentation into mobile ganglia, i.e., ganglion dynamics regime. We find that in addition to pressure‐driven connected pathway flow, mass transfer in the oil phase also occurs by a sequence of correlated breakup and coalescence processes. For example, meniscus oscillations caused by snap‐off events trigger coalescence of adjacent clusters. The ganglion dynamics occurs at the length scale of oil clusters and thus represents an intermediate flow regime between pore and Darcy scale that is so far dismissed in most upscaling attempts.
Synchrotron-based fast micro-tomography is the method of choice to observe in situ multiphase flow and displacement dynamics on the pore scale. However, the image processing workflow is sensitive to a suite of manually selected parameters which can lead to ambiguous results. In this work, the relationship between porosity and permeability in response to systematically varied gray-scale threshold values was studied for different segmentation approaches on a dataset of Berea sandstone at a voxel length of 3 µm. For validation of the image processing workflow, porosity, permeability, and capillary pressure were compared to laboratory measurements on a larger-sized core plug of the same material. It was found that for global thresholding, minor variations in the visually permissive range lead to large variations in porosity and even larger variations in permeability. The latter is caused by changes in the pore-scale flow paths. Pore throats were found to be open for flow at large thresholds but closed for smaller thresholds. Watershed-based segmentation was found to be significantly more robust to manually chosen input parameters. Permeability and capillary pressure closely match experimental values; for capillary pressure measurements, the plateau of calculated capillary pressure curves was similar to experimental curves. Modeling on structures segmented with hysteresis thresholding was found to overpredict experimental capillary pressure values, while calculated permeability showed reasonable agreement to experimental data. This demonstrates that a good representation of permeability or capillary pressure alone is not a sufficient quality criterion for appropriate segmentation, but the data should be validated with both parameters. However, porosity is the least reliable quality criterion. In the segmented images, always a lower porosity was found compared to experimental values due to micro-porosity below the imaging resolution. As a result, it is recommended to base the validation of image processing workflows on permeability and capillary pressure and not on porosity. Decane-brine distributions from a multiphase flow experiment were modeled in a thus validated µ-CT pore space using a morphological approach which captures only capillary forces. A good overall correspondence was found when comparing (capillary-controlled) equilibrium fluid distributions before and after pore-scale displacement events.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.