Upscaling Multiphase Flow In Porous Media

This book provides concise, up-to-date and easy-to-follow information on certain aspects of an ever important research area: multiphase flow in porous media. This flow type is of great significance in many petroleum and environmental engineering problems, such as in secondary and tertiary oil recovery, subsurface remediation and CO2 sequestration. This book contains a collection of selected papers (all refereed) from a number of well-known experts on multiphase flow. The papers describe both recent and state-of-the-art modeling and experimental techniques for study of multiphase flow phenomena in porous media. Specifically, the book analyses three advanced topics: upscaling, pore-scale modeling, and dynamic effects in multiphase flow in porous media. This will be an invaluable reference for the development of new theories and computer-based modeling techniques for solving realistic multiphase flow problems. Part of this book has already been published in a journal. Audience This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and consultants working in the area of flow in porous media.

- Explains exergy return on exergy invested (ERoEI) so that the reader can make his own judgements as to the costs of recovering energy from conventional and non-conventional resources - Deals with single phase flow aspects (inertia, anisotropy, slip), which admittedly are covered in other textbooks, but out of the contexts of petroleum and environmental engineering. - Gives readers the tools to generate heterogeneous permeability fields (stochastic random fields, marked point processes, Markov chains, which makes it possible to evaluate the effects of heterogeneity on flow - Includes an elaborate section on surface chemistry to understand wetting behaviour and its influence on the relative permeability and capillary pressure behaviour - Derives effective permeabilities and relative permeabilities in upscaled models and illustrates this with examples in EXCEL

The study of multiphase flow through porous media is undergoing intense development, mostly due to the recent introduction of new methods. After the profound changes induced by percolation in the eighties, attention is nowadays focused on the pore scale. The physical situation is complex and only recently have tools become available that allow significant progress to be made in the area. This volume on Multiphase Flow in Porous Media, which is also being published as a special issue of the journal Transport in Porous Media, contains contributions on the lattice-Boltzmann technique, the renormalization technique, and semi-phenomenological studies at the pore level. Attention is mostly focused on two- and three-phase flows. These techniques are of tremendous importance for the numerous applications of multiphase flows in oil fields, unsaturated soils, the chemical industry, and environmental sciences.

The need to predict, understand, and optimize complex physical and c- mical processes occurring in and around the earth, such as groundwater c- tamination, oil reservoir production, discovering new oil reserves, and ocean hydrodynamics, has been increasingly recognized. Despite their seemingly disparate natures, these geoscience problems have many common mathe- tical and computational characteristics. The techniques used to describe and study them are applicable across a broad range of areas. The study of the above problems through physical experiments, mat- matical theory, and computational techniques requires interdisciplinary col- boration between engineers, mathematicians, computational scientists, and other researchers working in industry, government laboratories, and univ- sities. By bringing together such researchers, meaningful progress can be made in predicting, understanding, and optimizing physical and chemical processes. The International Workshop on Fluid Flow and Transport in Porous - dia was successfully held in Beijing, China, August 2{6, 1999. The aim of this workshop was to bring together applied mathematicians, computational scientists, and engineers working actively in the mathematical and nume- cal treatment of ?uid ?ow and transport in porous media. A broad range of researchers presented papers and discussed both problems and current, state-of-the-art techniques.

This book offers a fundamental and practical introduction to the use of computational methods. A thorough discussion of practical aspects of the subject is presented in a consistent manner, and the level of treatment is rigorous without being unnecessarily abstract. Each chapter ends with bibliographic information and exercises.

The book focuses on two issues related to mathematical and numerical modelling of flow in unsaturated porous media. In the first part numerical solution of the governing equations is discussed, with particular emphasis on the spatial discretization of highly nonlinear permeability coefficient. The second part deals with large scale flow in heterogeneous porous media of binary structure. Upscaled models are developed and it is shown that the presence of material heterogeneities may give rise to additional non-equilibrium terms in the governing equations or to hysteresis in the averaged constitutive relationships.

This book provides a fundamental description of multiphase fluid flow through porous rock, based on understanding movement at the pore, or microscopic, scale.