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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 3: Wetting - organized by Stefan Karpitschka (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen) (joint session CPP/DY)
CPP 3.14: Talk
Monday, March 22, 2021, 15:40–16:00, CPPb
Macroscopic Capillary Number for Characterization of Two-phase Flow in Porous Media — •Hu Guo and Rudolf Hilfer — Institute for Computational Physics, Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
The Capillary number (Ca) defined as the ratio of viscous force to capillary force is widely used to qualitatively characterize multiphase flow in porous media as in carbon dioxide geologic sequestration and chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The main difficulty is to characterize forces porperly. There exists 22 definitions for Ca (Guo et al, IOR 2020). The most concise definition is Ca=v µ/σ with velocity v, viscosity µ and interfacial tension σ (Saffman and Taylor, 1958). It is supported by core flooding tests and most widely used. However, this definition is less sound than the one that involves the wettability parameter (Moore and Slobod, 1955). Meanwhile, the values of these Ca are regarded as too small to reflect the actual force balance (Dullien, 1979). It was shown theoretically, that this Ca is microscopic in nature and incorrectly used (Hilfer and Øren, 1996, Trans. Porous Media).
We study the new macroscopic capillary number Ca= µ φ v L/K Pb with viscosity µ, porosity φ, velocity v, permeability K, length L and capillary breakthrough pressure Pb (Hilfer et al, 2015, Physical Review E). The new Ca explains some of the latest observations (Doorwar and Mohanty, 2017, SPE J; Qi et al, 2017, SPE J; Rabbani et al, 2018, PNAS; Zhao et al, 2019, PNAS) that contradict predictions obtained from the microscopic Ca. EOR field practice also verified that the macroscopic Ca is more profound.