Measurement of Interfacial Area Production and Permeability Within Porous Media

An understanding of the pore-level interactions that affect multi-phase flow in porous media is important in many subsurface engineering applications, including enhanced oil recovery, remediation of dense non-aqueous liquid contaminated sites, and geologic CO₂ sequestration. Standard models of two-phase flow in porous media have been shown to have several shortcomings, which might partially be overcome using a recently developed model based on thermodynamic principles that includes interfacial area as an additional parameter. A few static experimental studies have been previously performed, which allowed the determination of static parameters of the model, but no information exists concerning the interfacial area dynamic parameters. A new experimental porous flow cell that was constructed using stereolithography for two-phase gas-liquid flow studies was used in conjunction with an in-house analysis code to provide information on dynamic evolution of both fluid phases and gas-liquid interfaces. In this paper, we give a brief introduction to the new generalized model of two-phase flow model and describe how the stereolithography flow cell experimental setup was used to obtain the dynamic parameters for the interfacial area numerical model. In particular, the methods used to determine the interfacial area permeability and production terms are shown.