Estimation of Relative Permeability using the Lattice Boltzmann Method for Fluid Flows in a Cretaceous Formation, Abu Dhabi

Grader, A.S.; Mu, Yaoming; Toelke, Jonas; Baldwin, Chuck; Fang, Qian; Carpio, G W; Stenger, Bruno; Dayyani, Taha Al; Kalam, Zubair

doi:10.2118/138591-ms

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…LB methods are a popular way to simulate fluid flow [1,2,3,4,31] in many areas including material science [15,14], hydrology [11], biology [9] as well as the simulation of oil and gas behaviour in porous rock [32,33,34,35,36]. LB simulations of flow through pore geometries derived from real rocks have been used to estimate effective permeability [37] or relative permeability [38,39], using microporous rocks [40], sandstones [41] (even the same Fontainebleau sandstone that we use in this study [42]) and (typically with more complex porosity) carbonates [39]. Ever since computational power became sufficient to run LB on realistic simulations, this method has been a popular alternative to the direct solution of the Stokes equation.…”

Section: Lattice Boltzmann (Lb)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrating Lattice Boltzmann flow simulations and estimating uncertainty in the permeability of complex porous media

Hosa

Curtis

Wood

2016

Advances in Water Resources

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A common way to simulate fluid flow in porous media is to use Lattice Boltzmann (LB) methods. Permeability predictions from such flow simulations are controlled by parameters whose settings must be calibrated in order to produce realistic modelling results. Herein we focus on the simplest and most commonly used implementation of the LB method: the single-relaxation-time BGK model. A key parameter in the BGK model is the relaxation time τ which controls flow velocity and has a substantial influence on the permeability calculation. Currently there is no rigorous scheme to calibrate its value for models of real media. We show that the standard method of calibration, by matching the flow profile

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Section: Lattice Boltzmann (Lb)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibrating Lattice Boltzmann flow simulations and estimating uncertainty in the permeability of complex porous media

Hosa

Curtis

Wood

2016

Advances in Water Resources

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“…Diemelstadt sandstone has a typical porosity of 0.24, and average grain radius of 80µm [44]. The nominal permeability of similar sandstones is reported as approximately 1D, and is typically isotropic [3,45,46,4]. From this sample a CT image with a resolution of 1000vx 3 (where vx denotes a voxel unit) was obtained.…”

Section: Digital Rock Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following filtering of artifacts the voxels must be segmented into void, solid and boundary regions so that they may be mapped to an LBM domain. In the works of [1,3,4] binary segmentation is applied, so that voxel densities above I are deemed solid, and those below I are deemed void. Since we intend to apply the partial bounceback boundary condition to represent grey areas between solid and void space, a new process of segmentation must be defined which yields a mapping between the voxel density and β in equation (5).…”

Section: Segmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effect of image scaling and segmentation in digital rock characterisation

Jones

Feng

2015

Comp. Part. Mech.

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Digital material characterisation from microstructural geometry is an emerging field in computer simulation. For permeability characterisation, a variety of studies exist where the lattice Boltzmann method has been used in conjunction with CT imaging to simulate fluid flow through microscopic rock pores. Whilst these previous works show that the technique is applicable, the use of binary image segmentation and the bounceback boundary condition results in a loss of grain surface definition when the modelled geometry is compared to the original CT image. We apply the immersed moving boundary condition of Noble & Torczynski as a partial bounceback boundary condition which may be used to better represent the geometric definition provided by a CT image. The immersed moving boundary condition is validated against published work on idealised porous geometries in both 2D and 3D. Following this, greyscale image segmentation is applied to a CT image of Diemelstadt sandstone. By varying the mapping of CT voxel densities to lattice sites, it is shown that binary image segmentation may underestimate the true permeability of the sample. A CUDA-C based code, LBM-C, was developed specifically for this work and leverages GPU hardware in order to carry out computations.

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“…42 studied the wettability effect on saturation functions and impact on reservoir characterization of Middle East reservoirs based on the experimental data. Grader et al 43 presented a digital rock-physics method to predict relative permeabilities using Lattice-Boltzmann method for fluid flow modeling without any reference from SCAL data, but this approach has not been widely accepted.…”

Section: Dynamic Reservoir Rock Typingmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Improved Approach for Generating Saturation Functions for Simulation Models Using Dynamic Rock Types

Ghedan

Huang

2012

All Days

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Rock typing is a key factor in reservoir characterization studies. It is often assumed that Static Reservoir Rock Types (SRRTs) are capable of assigning multi-phase flow characteristics, such as capillary pressure and relative permeability curves to the cells of dynamic simulation models. However, SRRTs fail to capture the actual reservoir variability, due to lack of representation of wettability difference at different elevations above Free Water Level (FWL), especially in highly heterogeneous thick carbonate reservoirs. These shortcomings of SRRTs can be resolved through Dynamic Reservoir Rock Types (DRRTs), in which wettability effect is imposed on SRRTs to generate saturation functions for simulation models.This research proposes a modified DRRT approach by integrating the data from geological models and SCAL tests. First, the defined static rock types are sub-divided into sub-static rock types using either porosity or permeability frequency distribution. Second, a modified correlation equation is proposed and applied to more accurately estimate the initial water saturation versus height above FWL from well logs. Third, each sub-static rock type is further divided into a number of DRRTs by determining the capillary pressure and relative permeability curves in the oil zone from the Gas-Oil Contact (GOC) to the Dry-Oil Limit (DOL). The DRRTs are extended to the zone from DOL to the FWL by including wettability effect which would affect the curvature of the relative permeability curves but not its saturation end points, through changing the Corey exponents in the modified Brooks-Corey model. This modified DRRT approach is applied in terms of the dynamic rock typing plug-ins to generate sub-rock types from static rock types, and build a comprehensive and automatic approach to generate saturation tables for dynamic rock types that can be prospectively loaded into commercial simulators for reliable reservoir initialization, history match and prediction processes. SPE 160683The main rock typing approaches can be categorized into rock-fabric number, flow zone indicator and pore-throat radius 7, 8 . The rock-fabric number links rock-types petrophysical properties to a rock fabric classification that groups carbonate rocks into three categories 9 . Al-Aruri 10 applied the Carman-Kozeny model to define nine rock types principally by the similarity of the geological texture, litholgoy, porosity and permeability (Figure 1). The pore-throat radius approach 11 links rock type's petrophysical properties to the pore-throat radius7.Carbonate reservoirs are very heterogeneous with obvious wettability variations with respect to depth. The complexity of carbonates and the importance of defining rock types have been the subjects of many papers1 ,3, 12, 13 . Most of current practices are either based on petrophysical properties, such as porosity, permeability and drainage capillary pressure, or geological description, such as facies and sedimentary environment, diagenetic overprints, or a combination of them, which are commonly con...

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Estimation of Relative Permeability using the Lattice Boltzmann Method for Fluid Flows in a Cretaceous Formation, Abu Dhabi

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

Calibrating Lattice Boltzmann flow simulations and estimating uncertainty in the permeability of complex porous media

Calibrating Lattice Boltzmann flow simulations and estimating uncertainty in the permeability of complex porous media

Effect of image scaling and segmentation in digital rock characterisation

An Improved Approach for Generating Saturation Functions for Simulation Models Using Dynamic Rock Types

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