Pore-scale contact angle measurements at reservoir conditions using X-ray microtomography

By Matthew Andrew, Branko Bijeljic, Martin J. Blunt. 2014

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contact angle is a principal control of the flow of multiple fluid phases through porous media; however its measurement on other than flat surfaces remains a challenge. A new method is presented for the mea- surement of the contact angle between immiscible fluids at the pore scale at reservoir conditions (10 MPa and 50 C) inside a quarry limestone through the use of X-ray microtomography. It is applied to a super- critical CO2-brine-carbonate system by resampling the micro-CT data onto planes orthogonal to the con- tact lines, allowing for vectors to be traced along the grain surface and the CO2-brine interface. A distri- bution of contact angles ranging from 35 to 55 is observed, indicating that the CO2-brine-carbonate system is weakly water-wet. This range of contact angles can be understood as the result of contact angle hysteresis and surface heterogeneity on a range of length scales. Surface heterogeneity is examined by comparison of micro-CT results with optical thin sections and SEM images. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-SA license

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cce1a7c23792e5ac2166b6ba8f9a9940e8ffc1f2

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Citations in the corpus

Pore‐by‐pore capillary pressure measurements using X‐ray microtomography at reservoir conditions: Curvature, snap‐off, and remobilization of residual CO2 (2014, methodology): “Sample preparation procedures and further details of the apparatus are provided elsewhere [Andrew et al., 2014b].”
Capillary trapping for geologic carbon dioxide storage - From pore scale physics to field scale implications (2015, background): “Furthermore, the size distribution of trapped ganglia obeys an approximate power-law distribution (Andrew et al., 2014b), consistent with percolation theory where throats are simply filled in order of size (Wilkinson and Willemsen, 1983; Blunt and Scher, 1995).”
The Imaging of Dynamic Multiphase Fluid Flow Using Synchrotron-Based X-ray Microtomography at Reservoir Conditions (2015, methodology): “This finding supports the findings of Andrew et al. (2014a) correlating the capillary pressures of a set of ganglia at residual saturation with the inverse of local throat radius (and so snap-off capillary pressure), a correlation which should only be present if the snap-off capillary pressure of…”
Direct simulations of two-phase flow on micro-CT images of porous media and upscaling of pore-scale forces (2014, methodology): “The contact angle used is zero during oil injection and 45 in all water-injection simulations, consistent with direct in situ measurements in a water-wet rock [5].”