This thesis presents an experimental investigation of two-phase flow properties of porous rock samples having different scales ranging from micro-CT imaging to conventional core plug scales. Advances in micro-CT imaging of porous materials provide the opportunity to extract representative networks from the images. This improves the predictive capability of porescale network models to predict multiphase flow properties. However, all these predictions need to be validated with laboratory data. Micro-CT imaging is currently limited to small sample sizes, having bulk volumes of the order of 0.1 cm??. Conventional core plugs, however, have sizes several orders of magnitude larger than that (bulk volumes of 10 cm?? or larger). The aim of this thesis is to investigate the scale effect on laboratory data and to provide reliable experimental data which can be used to test the predictive value of microCT based network models. Berea and Bentheim sandstones and Mount Gambier carbonate were used in the experiments. The core samples were thoroughly cleaned in order to obtain strongly, uniform water-wet conditions. Simple well-characterized fluid systems were chosen in the experiments: Air-brine fluid-system for drainage capillary pressure, resistivity index and spontaneous imbibition experiments while oil-brine fluid-system for wettability and relative permeability measurements. Drainage capillary pressure, resistivity index, relative permeability and spontaneous imbibition measurements were made on the cores having bulk volumes ranging from 0.1 to 12 cm??. Previous studies have shown that experiments at this scale are still lacking. The wettability was tried to keep strongly water-wet for all experiments. The experimental results show that the measurements of drainage capillary pressure, and resistivity index and spontaneous imbibition on small core samples, having similar scales as micro-CT imaging can be made accurately in the laboratory. The measurement of relative permeability remains challenging. This thesis concludes that commonly used homogeneous rock types (Berea and Bentheim sandstones and Mt. Gambier carbonate) can be considered to be sufficiently homogeneous from the pore to core scale based on the two-phase flow properties examined in this study. Hence, laboratory data taken from these rocks using conventional core plugs can be used to calibrate micro-CT based network models for multiphase flow properties.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258634 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Olafuyi, Olalekan Adisa, Petroleum Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Petroleum Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Olafuyi Olalekan Adisa., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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