Determining fluid saturations during multiphase flow experiments by NMR imaging techniques

Abstract

Editor's Note:The following four articles show the possibilities that computer-assisted tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide to understanding structure, permeability and fluid distribution in porous media, with applications to oil and natural gas production, fluidized and trickle beds, and related processes. Advanced imaging methods are beginning to produce useful 2-D and 3-D views of geometrically complex phenomena in real time. These research articles on CAT and MRI applied to problems involving porous solids were presented in a session at the April 1993 National AIChE meeting in Houston, organized by A. Kantzas. They went through regular Journal selection procedures and survived the demanding Journal review process. Determining Fluid Saturations during Multiphase Flow Experiments by NMR Imaging Techniques

Chemical imaging of multicomponent viscous fingering in chromatography

“…Since the early days of the technique, NMR has been used to measure diffusion (Carr and Purcell, 1954;Stejskal and Tanner, 1965) and other complex displacements such as flow, acceleration, and restricted diffusion (Caprihan and Fukushima, 1990;Callaghan, 1991). These developments have made MRI quite complementary to X-ray-computed tomography methods in studies of flow in porous media (Gummerson et al, 1979;Rothwell and Vinegar, 1985;Vinegar, 1986;Guillot, 1988), particularly in light of advances in quantitative MRI techniques (Caprihan and Fukushima, 1990;Chen et al, 1992;Chen et al, 1994). One disadvantage of conventional MRI visualization of solute transport in porous media, however, is that it is typically based on indirect detection of the solute via the abundant solvent signal.…”

Determining Spatial Distributions of Permeability

“…Spin-density imaging methods provide spatially resolved signals which are proportional to the magnetization intensity within each voxel (Chen et al 1994). In experiments involving bulk fluids, the observed magnetization intensity may be very close in magnitude to the intrinsic magnetization intensity.…”

Two‐phase flow in porous media: Property identification and model validation

“…The experimental design associated with the saturation measurements is based on the use of MRI (Chen et al, 1993(Chen et al, , 1994Kulkarni and Watson, 1997). MRI provides some significant advantages over the other techniques that have been used to monitor saturation.…”

“…Protons are imaged, so only thc oil phasc is observed. A known quantity of distilled water was used as a reference sample for signal intensity calibration purposes (Chen et al, 1993(Chen et al, , 1994. The experiments analyzed in this study are drainage cxperiments, for which the sample is initially completely saturated with the aqueous phase.…”

“…Thcn, the sample was dried, resaturated with D,O and the drainagc experiments conducted by injecting oil. Oil saturation can then be calculated by material balance for the proton species (Chen et al, 1993(Chen et al, , 1994Kulkarni and Watson, 1997).…”