סמינר מחלקה של אוונס אנטו
School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 14:00Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Drainage and imbibition coreflooding experiments: modeling and rock characterization using computational methods.
uthor: Evans Anto-Darkwah (PhD Candidate)
Supervisor: Dr. Avinoam Rabinovich
Coreflooding experiments are an important tool for characterization of subsurface reservoirs such as oil/gas reservoirs or aquifers. This is an essential step in constructing reservoir models which are commonly employed for oil and gas production, aquifer contaminant remediation and CO2 storage in saline aquifers. Characterization is primarily done by estimating rock-fluid properties of the core sample, such as permeability (k), relative permeability (kr), and capillary pressure (Pc), from overall pressure drop and saturation distribution measured at steady state during the experiments. In recent years, combining x-ray computed tomography (CT) with coreflooding has allowed to characterize sub-core properties, k(x,y,z) and krchar, on the millimeter scale. This has been a topic of increasing interest. Such studies allow to investigate the impact of sub-core heterogeneity on the core scale flow, to characterize capillary trapping, to estimate rate dependency of effective properties and to construct accurate numerical models for simulating drainage and imbibition corefloods.
This study presents new and improved methodologies to interpret coreflooding data obtained with x-ray CT to estimate sub-core properties k(x,y,z) and krchar on the millimeter scale. We construct numerical models with the estimated sub-core properties to accurately reproduce experimental saturations and pressure drops obtained from drainage and imbibition corefloods. We show robustness of our numerical models by applying to rocks of varying heterogeneities, different lithology (sandstone and limestones), experiments at constant or varying flow rates for drainage and imbibition type coreflooding experiments. It is expected that, accurate numerical models will eventually replace expensive, time consuming and cumbersome coreflooding experiments in the future.
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https://tau-ac-il.zoom.us/j/4962025174?pwd=bVJUeElXRUUya3BERisyNllLOE9EZz09
