Workflow for Direct Pore-Scale Simulation of Relative Permeability and Capillary Pressure Curves with Hysteresis at Low Capillary Numbers

Abstract

We propose an efficient workflow to estimate relative permeability and capillary pressure curves directly from pore-scale images for capillary dominated flows. In this workflow, we use a method to determine saturation configurations, and by coupling these configurations to a single-phase lattice Boltzmann fluid flow solver, we can impose higher order boundary conditions at the phase interfaces and avoid spurious currents and phase mixing. This removes some of the common drawbacks when employing multiphase fluid solvers: it improves numerical accuracy, and it increases the computational speed, compared to full two-phase simulations.