Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
Visualization of two-phase flow in micromodels of vugular porous media
Submission Author:
Jesús Daniel Fernández , RJ , Venezuela
Co-Authors:
Jesús Daniel Fernández, Jorge Antonio Avendaño Benavides, Marcio CARVALHO
Presenter: Jesús Daniel Fernández
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0274
Abstract
It is estimated that 50% of world oil production comes from naturally fractured reservoirs. In this kind of formations, the presence of macro-pores or vugs at different scales and distributions throughout the porous matrix brings the need to evaluate equivalent petrophysical properties of the porous media. In addition, matrix-vug interactions cause fluid flow characteristics to differ from those of conventional single microporosity reservoirs. In this study, a microfluidic approach is employed to visualize and understand the pore-scale phenomena of two-phase flow in a 2D hybrid-wet vugular porous media micromodel. It includes the prototyping of a random, linear porous matrix of straight and throat-type channels, incorporating different designs of vugs on this matrix, and the microfabrication of PDMS micromodels. Flow characteristics were analyzed from the pressure drop exclusively due to the porous media, refined pore-scale flow visualization through fluorescence microscopy and image processing. Steady-state experiments on simultaneous injection of simple aqueous and oleic phases were carried out to examine the effect of vugs on relative saturation and phase distribution inside the porous media. The direct comparison between the relative permeability curves of a well-characterized vugular porous media and its porous matrix showed that the incorporation of vugs leads to an increase in the permeability of the non-wetting phase, which is able to preferentially flow through the vugs and create inter-vug flow paths that improve the connection of the porous matrix.
Keywords
Vuggy porous media, PDMS micromodels, Two-phase Flow, relative permeability, microfluidcs
