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Relative Permeability Of Homogenous-Wet And Mixed-Wet Porous Media As Determined By Pore-Scale Lattice Boltzmann Modeling, C. J. Landry, Z. T. Karpyn, O. Ayala

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

We present a pore-scale study of two-phase relative permeability in homogenous-wet porous media, and porous media altered to a mixed-wet state. A Shan-Chen type multicomponent lattice Boltzmann (LB) model is employed to determine pore-scale fluid distributions and relative permeability. Mixed-wet states are created by altering the wettability of solid surfaces in contact with the nonwetting phase at the end of steady state simulation of initially homogenous-wet porous media. To ensure accurate representation of fluid-solid interfacial areas, we compare LB simulation results to experimental measurements of interfacial fluid-fluid and fluid-solid areas determined by X-ray computed microtomography imaging of water and oil …