In-situ characterization of capillary pressure during three-phase flow in porous media

Zankoor, Ahmed; Khishvand, Mahdi; McCaskill, Bradley; Piri, Mohammad

doi:10.1051/e3sconf/202336601006

Cited by 1 publication

(9 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The concluding remarks of this study are: During the gas injection process, a significant amount of the injected gas phase existed in the form of disconnected clusters separated from the larger invading ones, which was an interesting observation considering that this was a steady‐state drainage process. This behavior was attributed to several drainage‐related disconnection/trapping mechanisms. The results of this study, consistent with previous ones (Alhosani, Selem, et al., 2021; Zankoor, Khishvand, McCaskill, et al., 2021), show that gas may flow in the form of disconnected gas clusters during steady‐state flow. This behavior was evident by some disconnected gas clusters which had local capillary pressure values that varied across the cluster and were higher than those of the larger more connected ones.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…To determine the curvature of the pore‐scale interfaces, we extended the methodology described by Zankoor, Khishvand, Mohamed, et al. (2021) to three‐phase flow systems. To this end, the interfaces between each pair of fluids in the FOV were extracted from the segmented images and converted to meshed surfaces composed of triangular face elements.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, average curvature values representing the entire medium or local interfaces were obtained and used to calculate the capillary pressure using Equation . It has been observed that curvature values of fluid‐fluid interfaces in natural porous media always demonstrate distributions with both positive and negative values due to several reasons, such as the complexity of pore morphology, clay regions, and fluid layers (Zankoor, Khishvand, Mohamed, et al., 2021). For instance, inflection regions close to the solid surface tend to be impacted by the negative curvatures of the fluid‐solid interface, as shown in Figure 3.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, in this study, we can only find a unique solution for the three‐phase relative permeabilities at each saturation point using Correction (I). Table 3 lists the pressure drop and capillary pressure gradients, and the corrected relative permeability measurements using Corrections (I), and the full relative permeability analysis is given in the datasets associated with this paper (Zankoor et al., 2022). In general, the capillary pressure gradients are found to be considerable compared to the measured pressure drops and thus resulted in significant corrections to some of the relative permeability measurements.…”

Section: Relative Permeabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, a miniature Berea sandstone core sample was first fully saturated with a brine phase and then subjected to primary drainage with oil, secondary gas injection, tertiary waterflooding, and oil injection processes. At the end of each stage, the center of the core specimen was imaged using a micro‐CT scanner to generate the pore‐scale fluid occupancy maps (Khishvand et al., 2016) that were later analyzed using automated image analysis platforms (Zankoor, Khishvand, McCaskill, et al., 2021; Zankoor, Khishvand, Mohamed, et al., 2021). The results are then interpreted to obtain a detailed understanding of the interrelationships among these parameters and probe the pore‐scale subtleties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In‐Situ Capillary Pressure and Its Interrelationships With Flow Characteristics During Steady‐State Three‐Phase Flow in Water‐Wet Berea Sandstone

Zankoor

Khishvand

Piri

2022

Water Resources Research

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We present a detailed multi‐level investigation of steady‐state three‐phase flow processes in a water‐wet Berea sandstone sample. We use high‐resolution micro‐computed tomography images acquired during micro‐scale core‐flooding experiments which include successive gas injection, waterflooding, and nonspreading oil flooding steps. We develop and employ robust techniques to comprehensively characterize and probe the complex interrelationships between the pore‐scale three‐phase capillary pressures, fluid occupancy, displacement events, and the macroscopic flow behavior. The results demonstrate that the local capillary pressures involving the invading phase rise or drop in compliance with the changes in the macroscopic flow ratios. For instance, the gas‐oil capillary pressures were at their highest levels during the gas injection process (highest gas/oil fractional flow) and dropped during the subsequent processes. More importantly, the oil‐water capillary pressure is found to sharply rise during the gas injection process, implying that the gas‐displacing‐oil‐displacing‐water double displacements are the dominant double displacement mechanism during this experiment. For the waterflooding test, the local gas‐oil capillary pressures consistently decrease due to water‐displacing‐oil‐displacing‐gas double displacement events. Moreover, the results show that the variations in the gas‐liquid capillary pressures are more significant than those in the oil‐water capillary pressures. Also, the variations in all capillary pressures during gas injection are higher than in the subsequent processes. The higher variations in capillary pressure values are attributed to more localized and less uniform pore‐scale events across the medium. Finally, the capillary pressure gradients along the flow direction are incorporated in the three‐phase relative permeability measurements.

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