Pore Morphological Multi-Phase Digital Rock Physics Models
Abstract
To reduce expenses, failures, ecological footprints, and uncertainty of reservoir appraisal operations, digital rock physics workflows need to be evolved constantly. The traditional characterization procedures are being replaced by technology-rich environmentally sustainable virtual packages. The advancing high-resolution imaging technology offers the opportunity to directly capture exhaustive pore-level images and highlights the need for fast, reliable and multi-phase simulation techniques. Performing direct multi-phase simulations and tracking fluid-fluid and fluid-solid interfaces are the most essential and challenging parts of pore-level studies. There is a technical dilemma in the direct simulation of immiscible displacements between dynamic, e.g. CFD and Lattice-Boltzmann, and quasi-static, e.g. pore morphological, approaches. Once the partially saturated micro-scale realizations are generated, the effective mechanical, petrophysical and thermo-physical properties can be predicted applying steady-state simulations through solid fabrics and fluids spatial arrangements. In this thesis, direct voxel-based pore-level fluid flow models are proposed, validated and applied to real and synthetic porous media images. Two- and three-phase quasi-static pore morphological algorithms are first presented to simulate immiscible displacement processes and post-processing results are compared with experimental data available in the literature. The workflows are applied to predict thermo-physical and petrophysical characteristics of porous media from the pore-scale point of view. The filling process is adapted applying an object-based technique and the marching cubes algorithm is utilized to extract spreading and wetting films. To deal with the multi-scale nature of porous media and extent the capability and universality of the approach, a hybrid approach called DyMAS (Dynamic Morphology Assisted Simulation) is then proposed coupling pore morphological and CFD-based dynamic workflows.
Description
Keywords
Engineering--Petroleum
Citation
Mohammadmoradi, S. P. (2016). Pore Morphological Multi-Phase Digital Rock Physics Models (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27385