The macroscopic behaviour of air and water in porous media is often approximated using Richards' equation for the fluid saturation and pressure. This equation is parametrized by the hydraulic conductivity and water release curve. In this paper, we use homogenization to derive a general model for saturation and pressure in porous media based on an underlying periodic porous structure. Under an a...

Computational pore-scale network models describe two-phase porous media ̄ow systems by resolving individual interfaces at the pore scale, and tracking these interfaces through the pore network. Coupled with volume averaging techniques, these models can reproduce relationships between measured variables like capillary pressure, saturation, and relative permeability. In addition, these models all...

Capillary pressure/saturation data are often difficult and time consuming to measure, particularly for non-water-wetting porous media. Few capillary pressure/saturation predictive models, however, have been developed or verified for the range of wettability conditions that may be encountered in the natural subsurface. This work presents a new two-phase capillary pressure/saturation model for ap...

The knowledge of the area of interfaces between phases is important to understand and quantify many flow and transport processes in porous media. In this work, we apply the interfacial tracer technique to study the dependence of fluid-fluid interfacial area on saturation and wettability. The interfacial area between the wetting and the nonwetting phases (brine and decane) in unconsolidated poro...

Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation Dispersion (NMRD) is strongly sensitive to the microscopic wettability of oil and brine bearing carbonate rocks. Exploring a very large range of low frequency enables isolating the typical NMRD dispersion features, 1/T1Surf, associated to the different processes of molecular surface dynamics. This allows a separation of the surface and bulk microdynamics of oil and w...

We use a pore-scale network model in conjunction with conventional reservoir-scale simulations to investigate wettability variation within an oil/water transition zone. If the initial water saturation within the transition zone is controlled by primary drainage, we predict that initial production behavior is the same regardless of wettability. However, if the initial water saturation has been m...

[1] A simple bundle of capillary tubes model has been used to investigate electrokinetic coupling during the flow of water and an immiscible second phase such as air or oil. It is shown that the total electrokinetic coupling is the sum of the individual phase contributions. The electrokinetic coupling depends on the capillary size distribution and wettability. When water is the wetting phase an...

In a recent theoretical study, Li and Firoozabadi showed that if the wettability of porous media can be altered from preferential liquid-wetting to preferential gas-wetting, then gas well deliverability in gas condensate reservoirs can be increased. In this paper, we present the results that the wettability of porous media may indeed be altered from preferential liquid-wetting to preferential g...

Wettability and NMR surface relaxation are related to each other. Wettability controls the fluid distribution in porous media. NMR surface relaxation dictates that the fluid in contact with the mineral surface has a relaxation time shorter than its bulk value. In this study, first, the nature of wettability effect on NMR responses was demonstrated by a parameter ρ2, eff, the effective surface r...

The objective of this study is to obtain quantitative evidence of pore-scale immiscible fluid distribution in oil-wet and water-wet porous media using X-ray computed microtomography. Temporal and spatial saturation profiles, as well as surface and interfacial areas, are thoroughly analyzed through cycles of drainage and imbibition using samples with different wetting characteristics but similar...