Investigation of Spontaneous Imbibition Behavior in a 3D Pore Space Under Reservoir Condition by Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract

Unconventional oil reservoirs, which are previously classified as uneconomic resources by traditional developing methods, have become one of the important world energy supplying parts in recent years with the application of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and numerous enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods (K. Singh et al., 2019;Xie et al., 2021). These oil reservoirs usually bury deep underground with conditions characterized as high-pressure and high-temperature. In a typical unconventional oil reservoir exploitation, a hydraulic fracturing job is proceeded after the completion of horizontal drilling to increase transport channels for oil recovery (Z. Chen et al., 2020). Previously, a flowback operation of the fracturing fluid is usually designed to decrease the potential reservoir damage. However, recent developments in these oil fields showed that partly flowback or even no flowback with the subsequent shut-in operation increased the oil recovery (

Fluid entrapment during forced imbibition in a multidepth microfluidic chip with complex porous geometry

“…2015; Zheng et al. 2021). Gravity was neglected in this study because Bond number , where is the fluid density, g is the gravitational acceleration, r is the characteristic pore size and is fluid–fluid IFT.…”

“…2.3. Direct numerical simulation methods Direct numerical simulation within a computational fluid dynamics framework was conducted to investigate the impact of depth variation, capillary number and wettability on the multiphase flow dynamics and fluid entrapment during imbibition in porous media (Ferrari et al 2015;Zheng et al 2021). Gravity was neglected in this study because Bond number Bd = ρgr 2 /γ 1, where ρ is the fluid density, g is the gravitational acceleration, r is the characteristic pore size and γ is fluid-fluid IFT.…”

Wettability effect on displacement in disordered media under preferential flow conditions

“…Wettability, characterized by the contact angle between the fluid-fluid interface and solid architecture, also has a prominent role in the fluid dynamics and displacement efficiency in porous media. Under the hydrophilic condition, water tends to fill smaller pores or spread along the channel corners to trap the non-wetting fluids (Zheng et al 2021), otherwise, water will burst into the pores to occupy the pore space from its centre under the hydrophobic condition (Edery, Berg & Weitz 2018). Both wettability and preferential flow conditions have a profound influence on the fluid dynamics, flow patterns and displacement efficiency, therefore, it is crucial to understand the wettability effect on multiphase flow in a porous medium under preferential flow conditions, which is the theme of this paper.…”

Wetting Dynamics of Spontaneous Imbibition in Porous Media: From Pore Scale to Darcy Scale

“…Because pore‐scale events in spontaneous imbibition, particularly cocurrent spontaneous imbibition, are so quick that current imaging techniques may not capture them, the pore‐scale modeling will be tremendously beneficial. Previous pore‐scale modeling of spontaneous imbibition have been limited to synthetic 2‐D porous media or a porous domain smaller than the REV size (Bakhshian, Rabbani, et al., 2020; Diao et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2020; Rokhforouz & Akhlaghi Amiri, 2018; Zheng et al., 2021). As a result, the obtained pore‐scale information was not upscaled to Darcy‐scale capillary pressure and relative permeability.…”