title: Single- and two-phase flow simulation based on equivalent pore network extracted from micro-CT images of sandstone core.
abstract: Due to the intricate structure of porous rocks, relationships between porosity or saturation and petrophysical transport properties classically used for reservoir evaluation and recovery strategies are either very complex or nonexistent. Thus, the pore network model extracted from the natural porous media is emphasized as a breakthrough to predict the fluid transport properties in the complex micro pore structure. This paper presents a modified method of extracting the equivalent pore network model from the three-dimensional micro computed tomography images based on the maximum ball algorithm. The partition of pore and throat are improved to avoid tremendous memory usage when extracting the equivalent pore network model. The porosity calculated by the extracted pore network model agrees well with the original sandstone sample. Instead of the Poiseuille's law used in the original work, the Lattice-Boltzmann method is employed to simulate the single- and two- phase flow in the extracted pore network. Good agreements are acquired on relative permeability saturation curves of the simulation against the experiment results.
authors.affiliation: School of Geoscience and Technology, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, 610500 China.
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: School of Geoscience and Technology, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, 610500 China ; State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, 610500 China.
authors.forename: Jianjun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, 610500 China.
authors.forename: Mengmeng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cui
keywords: Image digitization based algorithm; Lattice-Boltzmann method; Micro-CT image; Pore network; Two-phase flow