A multiscale study on the effects of dynamic capillary pressure in two-phase flow in porous media
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pISSN: 0256-1115 eISSN: 1975-7220
INVITED REVIEW PAPER
INVITED REVIEW PAPER
A multiscale study on the effects of dynamic capillary pressure in two-phase flow in porous media Jassem Abbasi*,**, Mojtaba Ghaedi*,***,†, and Masoud Riazi* *Department of Petroleum Engineering, School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran **Zodan Solutions Ltd., London, United Kingdom ***Reservoir Modeling and Simulation Centre, School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran (Received 17 May 2020 • Revised 18 July 2020 • Accepted 19 July 2020) AbstractCapillary pressure is usually considered as a function of the rock and fluid properties, and saturation. However, recent studies have shown that capillary forces also are a function of the rate of change of saturation. Moreover, although it was observed that dynamic forces are highly scale dependent, the role of these effects in large-scale flow practices is still unclear. In this study, using an innovative numerical simulation approach, the impact of the mentioned parameters was studied in a highly heterogeneous oil reservoir that is under waterflooding process. It is observed that the role of dynamic capillary pressure, using routinely measured dynamic capillary coefficient values, is not important in large-scale problems. However, it would be important in the higher capillary coefficient values that are several orders of magnitude larger than the values reported in previous experimental studies. Furthermore, the role of rock heterogeneity is discussed and it is shown that neglecting the dynamic capillary effects in heterogeneous media may lead to misleading results in the prediction of the injection front behavior in the reservoir. The dynamic capillary effects, by lowering the imbibition capillary pressure in the front, leads to more frontal movement of the injection fluid. Also, it is shown that the dynamic effects are more sensible at points close to the injection wells in homogenous reservoirs, but, in the heterogenous models it is more dependent on rock properties than the distance from the injection wells. Keywords: Dynamic Capillary Pressure, Dynamic Capillary Coefficient, Capillary Number, Waterflooding dynamic
lary pressure, Pc [7-13]. It is suggested that the main reason for the difference between dynamic and static capillary pressure is the difference between the magnitude of the contact angles in dynamic and static conditions [14]. For the drainage process, this effect leads to more capillary pressure, and for the imbibition process it results in lower capillary pressure values with respect to static capillary pressure values. Also, in the drainage process, this value is more significant in mixed wet systems, and in the imbibition process the value can be considerable in strongly wet systems. Barenblatt [12] and Hassanizadeh et al. [15] introduced models for accounting the non-equilibrium effects in fluid flow processes. The first assumes non-equilibrium behavior for both relative permeability and capillary p
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