Micro-computed tomography pore-scale study of flow in porous media: Effect of voxel resolution
File(s)AWR-Acceptedmanuscript-SMSHAH.pdf (2.81 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Shah, SMK
Gray, F
Crawshaw, J
Boek, E
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
A fundamental understanding of flow in porous media at the pore-scale is necessary to be able to upscale average displacement processes from core to reservoir scale. The study of fluid flow in porous media at the pore-scale consists of two key procedures: Imaging - reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) pore space images; and modelling such as with single and two-phase flow simulations with Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) or Pore-Network (PN) Modelling. Here we analyse pore-scale results to predict petrophysical properties such as porosity, single-phase permeability and multi-phase properties at different length scales. The fundamental issue is to understand the image resolution dependency of transport properties, in order to up-scale the flow physics from pore to core scale. In this work, we use a high resolution micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanner to image and reconstruct three dimensional pore-scale images of five sandstones (Bentheimer, Berea, Clashach, Doddington and Stainton) and five complex carbonates (Ketton, Estaillades, Middle Eastern sample 3, Middle Eastern sample 5 and Indiana Limestone 1) at four different voxel resolutions (4.4 µm, 6.2 µm, 8.3 µm and 10.2 µm), scanning the same physical field of view. Implementing three phase segmentation (macro-pore phase, intermediate phase and grain phase) on pore-scale images helps to understand the importance of connected macro-porosity in the fluid flow for the samples studied. We then compute the petrophysical properties for all the samples using PN and LB simulations in order to study the influence of voxel resolution on petrophysical properties. We then introduce a numerical coarsening scheme which is used to coarsen a high voxel resolution image (4.4 µm) to lower resolutions (6.2 µm, 8.3 µm and 10.2 µm) and study the impact of coarsening data on macroscopic and multi-phase properties. Numerical coarsening of high resolution data is found to be superior to using a lower resolution scan because it avoids the problem of partial volume effects and reduces the scaling effect by preserving the pore-space properties influencing the transport properties. This is evidently compared in this study by predicting several pore network properties such as number of pores and throats, average pore and throat radius and coordination number for both scan based analysis and numerical coarsened data.
Date Issued
2015-07-21
Date Acceptance
2015-07-14
Citation
Advances in Water Resources, 2015, 95, pp.276-287
ISSN
1872-9657
Publisher
Elsevier
Start Page
276
End Page
287
Journal / Book Title
Advances in Water Resources
Volume
95
Copyright Statement
© 2015 Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Sponsor
Qatar Shell Research and Technology Center QSTP LLC
Grant Number
490000724
Subjects
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Water Resources
Pore-scale
micro-CT
Voxel resolution
Lattice Boltzmann
Pore Network
Numerical coarsening
2-PHASE FLOW
RELATIVE PERMEABILITY
BEREA SANDSTONE
IMAGES
SIMULATIONS
MORPHOLOGY
ALGORITHM
VISCOSITY
TRANSPORT
PRESSURE
Environmental Engineering
Civil Engineering
Publication Status
Published