Lattice Boltzmann simulation of immiscible fluid displacement in porous media: homogeneous versus heterogeneous pore network

By Haihu Liu, Yonghao Zhang, Albert J. Valocchi. 2015

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Injection of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) into geological formations is a promising approach to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Predicting the amount of CO2 that can be captured and its long-term storage stability in subsurface requires a fundamental understanding of multiphase displacement phenomena at the pore scale. In this paper, the lattice Boltzmann method is employed to simulate the immiscible displacement of a wetting fluid by a non-wetting one in two microfluidic flow cells, one with a homogeneous pore network and the other with a randomly heterogeneous pore network. We have identified three different displacement patterns, namely, stable displacement, capillary fingering, and viscous fingering, all of which are strongly dependent upon the capillary number (Ca), viscosity ratio (M), and the media heterogeneity. The non-wetting fluid saturation (Snw) is found to increase nearly linearly with logCa for each constant M. Increasing M (viscosity ratio of non-wetting fluid to...

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b7d3f2cb755aa09a3d3791d5e2b735a2469f637