Multiphase flow in anisotropic heterogeneous porous media

The fall in the reserve replacement rate means that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) will become increasingly important. Improving EOR requires a thorough understanding of capillary dominated flow through rocks containing heterogeneities e.g. faults and bedding. Conducting lab experiments on such material is trivial but interpreting the results is difficult as industry-standard flow codes that are used to model such experiments use upstream weighting, which ignores the relative permeability of the downstream cells. Also, no inversion scheme has been developed for interpreting experiments on heterogeneous material. Here it is proposed to develop numerical tools to address these issues. The first stage will be to develop an analytical model for steady-state flow in heterogeneous media, which shall be linked to inversion algorithms to identify the experimental data required to determine the fluid flow properties of individual constituents of heterogeneous samples. Experiments will be conducted to validate these numerical codes in the Wolfson multiphase flow lab. A CT-scanner will monitor the fluid saturation distribution. The final stage of the project will be to extend these tools to interpret non-steady state experiments. It is proposed to use the finite volume method to solve the forward problem.