Kantzas, Apostolos K.Rahmanian Shahri, Meysam2018-05-172018-05-172018-05-08Rahmanian Shahri, M. (2018). Effect of Grain Irregularity on Rock Petrophysical Parameters: A Numerical Pore-level Study (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/31923http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106642A good evaluation of transport properties in reservoir rocks plays a major role in the design of recovery process and prediction of recovery performance. Permeability, thermal and electrical conductivity, are important physical properties affecting fluid flow and fluid distribution. Numerical techniques based on image analysis can be considered as reliable alternative approaches to either experimental methods or empirical correlations to estimate petrophysical properties. There are various numerical approaches to directly simulate fluid flow through a virtual porous medium. For instance, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Lattice-Boltzmann as dynamic methods, and pore morphological as quasi-static approaches are the most popular techniques to simulate flow through porous materials. A virtual porous medium can be provided by binarizing either the real CT scan images of porous media or even the synthetic images generated by statistical approaches. In this regard, the virtual porous media have to properly mimic the physical features of real sands. As providing real CT scan images with high-resolution of rock samples is expensive and time consuming, utilizing statistical approaches to generating synthetic porous media based on Particle Size Distribution (PSD) and porosity of real sands could be considered as an alternative to reconstruct virtual porous media. To generate a virtual porous medium statistically, an innovative algorithm is proposed in this research generating irregular grains based on a given porosity and particle size distribution (PSD). The proposed procedure is inspired from the crystallization concept. In this method, the shape, orientation and structure of the grains can be readily controlled by the user. This provides the opportunity to investigate the effect of some geometrical parameters such as grain irregularity on rock and flow properties. In this study, several virtual porous media with different porosities, sphericities and PSD are constructed using the proposed approach. Based on the simulation results on these media the effect of grain irregularity on transport properties and onset of non-Darcy flow is investigated.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.transport propertiesSimulationgrain irregularitypermeabilityformation factorporositynon-Darcy flowcrystallization processstatistical approachStatisticsEngineering--ChemicalEngineering--Petroleummaster thesis10.11575/PRISM/31923