A Novel Approach to Measuring Water and Oil Relative Permeabilities in Two-phase Fluid Flow in Porous Media

Abstract

In this study, direct laboratory measurements of unsteady-state imbibition test are used in a new approach to obtain relative permeability curves with no predetermined functionality assumptions. Four equations of continuity, Darcy’s law, cumulative oil production, and water fractional flow are employed in combination together under certain assumptions to present the new approach which interprets these data. We assumed that capillary pressure was previously measured and used as the input data in the method. The main difference between this work and previous unsteady-state methods is to replace the saturation profile, needed to obtain relative permeability curves, with a new saturation-dependent graph which can be measured from recovery data rather than being recorded directly during experiments. The method is demonstrated by employing recovery data from the literature, and it is then verified by a numerical simulator. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is comparable with accurate complex methods. Performing sensitivity analysis indicates that the proposed method can achieve more accurate results when applied to cases with a relatively high capillary number and/or low water-oil mobility ratio and when applied to media having uniformly sized pores.

Keywords

• relative permeability
• waterflooding
• analytical methods
• saturation profile
• two-phase flow