Lecture Topic: Capillarity dynamics of spontaneous imbibition in porous media: from pore-scale to continuum scale

Lecturer: Professor Qin Chaozhong

Lecture Time: December 20, 2019 (Friday), 3:00 p.m.

Location of Lecture: State Key Laboratory A403 Academic Report Hall

Abstract:

Spontaneous imbibition plays an important role in many subsurface applications such as enhanced oil/gas recovery in fractured reservoirs and geological sequestration of carbon dioxide. In those applications, the imbibition rate and the trapping of nonwetting phase are of great interest. To predict spontaneous imbibition by the two-phase Darcy model, a number of material properties need to be determined such as capillary pressure and relative permeability. Moreover, sharp wetting fronts observed in many core-scale experiments indicate that capillarity dynamics in spontaneous imbibition is strong, particularly at its early stage. This challenges conventional measurements of material properties which were mostly conducted in the equilibrium. In this talk, I will first introduce a novel dynamic pore-network model for spontaneous imbibition in porous media. Multiform idealized pore elements have been used to represent complex pore spaces so that our model bears the potential to quantitatively predict spontaneous imbibition for a‘real’porous medium. The model is used to understand capillarity dynamics at the pore scale. Then, I will address the upscaling of the pore-scale information to the REV-scale modeling of spontaneous imbibition. Finally, I will summarize the challenges in the REV-scale modeling of spontaneous imbibition in porous media; and further talk about how to include this capillarity dynamics in the two-phase model.

About the Lecturer:

Professor Qin Chaozhong is currentlyadoctoral advisor at Chongqin University. He has performed postdoctoral research at Utrecht University (2012.10-2016.10) and Eindhoven University (2016.10-2019.9) in the Netherlands. He has published nearly 20 papers in top international journals including Water Resources Research, Advances in Water Resources, and Transport in Porous Media.

Host Organizations:

State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation

SWPU Department of Science and Technology

School of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering