Role of Relative Permeability Hysteresis in Modified Salinity Water Flooding

Impact of Wettability Alteration on the Front Instability of Immiscible Displacement in Porous Media

“…Wettability is a pore‐scale property that influences the relative mobility, location and spatial distribution of fluid phases in porous media (Anderson, 1987; Kassa et al., 2021). The wettability alteration caused by physicochemical interactions between the rock, and the injected and formation fluids is assumed to directly change the shape of relative permeability and capillary pressure curves (Hosseinzadehsadati et al., 2022a, 2022b; Lake, 1989). Corey's equation can be used to describe the relative permeability function (Brooks & Corey, 1966), $$${S}_{w}^{\ast }=\frac{{S}_{w}-{S}_{\text{wi}}}{1-{S}_{\text{wi}}-{S}_{\text{nr}}}$$$ $$${k}_{\text{rw}}={k}_{\text{rw},\mathrm{max}}{\left({S}_{w}^{\ast }\right)}^{{n}_{w}}$$$ $$${k}_{\text{rn}}={k}_{\text{rn},\mathrm{max}}{\left(1-{S}_{w}^{\ast }\right)}^{{n}_{n}}$$$ where S w is water saturation, S wi is irreducible water saturation, S nr is residual NAPL phase saturation, and n w and n n are Corey's exponents for water and NAPL phase, respectively.…”

“…As shown in Figure S2 of Supporting Information , 2D and 3D models with a size of 200 × 80 m 2 and 200 × 80 × 80 m 3 are designed for numerical analysis, respectively, bears a close resemblance to the one proposed by Hosseinzadehsadati et al. (2022a, 2022b). One should note that the grid blocks size has to be smaller than the wavelength of fingers to ensure numerical accuracy.…”

“…A donation request form is available from Schlumberger for academic/research institutions at Software Donation Request (https://www.software.slb.com/softwaredonationform). Data sets related to this article can also be found at Hosseinzadehsadati et al., 2022b, https://doi.org/10.11583/DTU.17728562, an open‐source online data repository hosted at Technical University of Denmark (DTU) data. Publicly accessible data will be available through the DTU data link upon publication, and the temporary link for the purposes of peer review can be found at https://figshare.com/s/e200d64de4482366173a.…”