(1) Faculty of Engineering, University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada, S4S 0A2;(2) Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, N2L 3G1
Abstract:
An interacting capillary bundle model is developed for analysing immiscible displacement processes in porous media. In this model, pressure equilibration among the capillaries is stipulated and capillary forces are included. This feature makes the model entirely different from the traditional tube bundle models in which fluids in different capillaries are independent of each other. In this work, displacements of a non-wetting phase by a wetting phase at different injection rates were analysed using the interacting capillary bundle model. The predicted evolutions of saturation profiles were consistent with both numerical simulation and experimental results for porous media reported in literature which cannot be re-produced with the non-interacting tube bundle models.