TY - JOUR
T1 - Inertial Effects During the Process of Supercritical CO2 Displacing Brine in a Sandstone
T2 - Lattice Boltzmann Simulations Based on the Continuum-Surface-Force and Geometrical Wetting Models
AU - Chen, Yu
AU - Valocchi, Albert J.
AU - Kang, Qinjun
AU - Viswanathan, Hari S.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Y. Li and Dr. K. Christensen for providing the experimental data of the micromodel and Dr. A. Herring and Dr. D. Wildenschild for providing micro-CT scans of the Bentheimer sandstone. This work was supported by LANL's LDRD program and was supported as part of the Center for Geologic Storage of CO2, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under Award DE-SC0C12504. This research primarily used resources provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institutional Computing Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract 89233218CNA000001. This work partially used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant ACI-1548562. Specifically, it used the TACC Stampede 2 system (allocation ID: EAR160028). All data used for the plots were generated using our own computer codes. The geometry and phase distribution data sets (Chen et al.,) of the micromodel and sandstone simulations are available via the Digital Rocks Portal: https://www.digitalrocksportal.org/projects/234, doi:10.17612/1fhh-q252.
Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Dr. Y. Li and Dr. K. Christensen for providing the experimental data of the micromodel and Dr. A. Herring and Dr. D. Wildenschild for providing micro‐CT scans of the Bentheimer sandstone. This work was supported by LANL's LDRD program and was supported as part of the Center for Geologic Storage of CO ) of the micromodel and sandstone simulations are available via the Digital Rocks Portal: 2 , an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under Award DE‐SC0C12504. This research primarily used resources provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institutional Computing Program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract 89233218CNA000001. This work partially used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant ACI‐1548562. Specifically, it used the TACC Stampede 2 system (allocation ID: EAR160028). All data used for the plots were generated using our own computer codes. The geometry and phase distribution data sets (Chen et al., https://www.digitalrocksportal.org/projects/234 , doi:10.17612/1fhh‐q252.
Publisher Copyright:
©2019. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Inertial effects during the process of supercritical CO2 displacing brine in porous media may not be negligible according to recent studies. Capturing the inertial effects of the physical CO2-brine system imposes a requirement on the grid resolution and viscosity to surface tension ratio for pore-scale simulations, which some commonly used simulators may not be able to meet. To fulfill the parameter requirement, we combine the continuum-surface-force based color-gradient lattice Boltzmann (LB) multiphase model and the geometrical wetting model and extend the model to 3D under the multiple-relaxation-time framework. We validate the model via simple benchmarks which show significant improvement over the traditional models. We then perform 3D drainage simulations in a heterogeneous micromodel where the simulation result agrees well with experimental data, while our previous work fails to reproduce certain displacement patterns in the experiment due to the use of a traditional LB model that cannot fulfill the parameter requirement. Finally, we perform high-fidelity 3D drainage simulations to study the inertial effects in a Bentheimer sandstone sample. Our results show that stronger inertial effects generally help develop more CO2 flow pathways for the same capillary number which results in higher CO2 saturation, consistent with the micromodel results. The phenomena can be found in both low and high capillary number cases, indicating that the inertial effects are not dependent on the mean velocity. In addition, the change of the invasion patterns is not proportional to the change of inertial effects, thus exhibiting threshold behavior.
AB - Inertial effects during the process of supercritical CO2 displacing brine in porous media may not be negligible according to recent studies. Capturing the inertial effects of the physical CO2-brine system imposes a requirement on the grid resolution and viscosity to surface tension ratio for pore-scale simulations, which some commonly used simulators may not be able to meet. To fulfill the parameter requirement, we combine the continuum-surface-force based color-gradient lattice Boltzmann (LB) multiphase model and the geometrical wetting model and extend the model to 3D under the multiple-relaxation-time framework. We validate the model via simple benchmarks which show significant improvement over the traditional models. We then perform 3D drainage simulations in a heterogeneous micromodel where the simulation result agrees well with experimental data, while our previous work fails to reproduce certain displacement patterns in the experiment due to the use of a traditional LB model that cannot fulfill the parameter requirement. Finally, we perform high-fidelity 3D drainage simulations to study the inertial effects in a Bentheimer sandstone sample. Our results show that stronger inertial effects generally help develop more CO2 flow pathways for the same capillary number which results in higher CO2 saturation, consistent with the micromodel results. The phenomena can be found in both low and high capillary number cases, indicating that the inertial effects are not dependent on the mean velocity. In addition, the change of the invasion patterns is not proportional to the change of inertial effects, thus exhibiting threshold behavior.
KW - \special t4ht@.<spispace>CO sequestration
KW - continuum-surface-force model
KW - geometrical wetting model
KW - inertial effects
KW - lattice Boltzmann method
KW - pore-scale simulation
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U2 - 10.1029/2019WR025746
DO - 10.1029/2019WR025746
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076902928
SN - 0043-1397
VL - 55
SP - 11144
EP - 11165
JO - Water Resources Research
JF - Water Resources Research
IS - 12
ER -