Pore-scale study of the effects of grain size on the capillary-associated interfacial area during primary drainage

作者：Huhao Gao, Hiwa Abdullah, A.B. Tatomir, Nikolaos Karadimitriou, Holger Steeb, Dejian Zhou, Quan Liu, Martin Sauter · 发表于：Journal of Hydrology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.130865 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques、Hydraulic Fracturing and Reservoir Analysis、Hydrocarbon exploration and reservoir analysis

• The IFA production rate increases with decreasing grain size. • The IFA production rate for fingering is larger than that for stable displacement. • The disconnected IFA depends on the average volume of the clusters. • For stable displacement, the connected IFA is larger for larger grain sizes. • For fingering, the connected IFA is smaller for larger grain sizes. This study investigates the capillary-associated interfacial area during primary drainage in unconsolidated porous media for different mean grain diameters, employing pore-scale numerical simulation with the phase-field method. Five, two-dimensional porous media are generated with the same grain/pore size uniformity, but different mean grain diameters, ranging between 0.24 mm and 0.94 mm. Three cases are considered, representing stable displacement, crossover zone and viscous-fingering regimes. The findings reveal that the capillary-associated interfacial production rate increases with decreasing grain size. Specifically, the capillary-associated interfacial production rate is higher for the viscous-fingering regime compared to the stable displacement. The maximum capillary-associated interfacial area obtained for different grain sizes agrees with the correlation established in our previous study using the kinetic interface-sensitive tracer. Furthermore, the capillary-associated interfacial area is divided into two parts: one related to the disconnected water clusters and the other related to the connected water. T...