Tese e Dissertação

Tese: Numerical evaluation of equivalent permeability in 3d vuggy porous media using Brinkman model

Macroscopic rock properties such as porosity, permeability, and wave velocity describe petrophysical characteristics of rocks. In the particular case of heterogeneous rocks like carbonates, the estimation of equivalent petrophysical properties is challenging because of the presence of distinct rock structures in the same domain of interest. Also, the presence of voids with sizes of disparate orders of magnitude imposes extra difficulty to predict equivalent properties in carbonates. Equivalent properties can be determined through experimental measurements in the laboratory, which can be relatively slow and expensive, or via numerical simulation. In this study, we determined equivalent permeability of vuggy porous media using a Digital Rock Physics workflow, which is comprised of the microCT scan of the rock sample, the segmentation of the digital image, the mesh generation on the porous matrix and vuggy regions, and the solution of the Brinkman model using the finite element method. Digital Image Analysis (DIA) was used to determine the characteristics of the macropores (volume, surface area, pattern, among others), which were use to curve-fit the equivalent permeability resulting from solutions of the Brinkman model for many different samples. The goal was to be able to evaluate the equivalent permeability simply based on the image characteristics of the sample, without the need of solving the Brinkman model  

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