Sharif Digital Repository

This work concerns with developing a non-equilibrium model of gravity drainage in a single block. The proposed model which considers both non-equilibrium effects of capillary pressure and relative permeabilities is used for prediction of oil recovery by gravity drainage from a single block. Close agreement observed between the model results and experimental data disclosed that the non-equilibrium assumption is completely reliable for modeling of gravity drainage. The results revealed that when the characteristic time of the saturation variation is comparable with the time required to establish capillary equilibrium, the non-equilibrium effects in gravity drainage must be considered. The... 

In this work a generalized non-equilibrium model of three-phase flow in porous media including gravity as well as capillary terms is developed and used for analysis of Riemann's problem in several three-phase systems. The proposed model uses the extension of Barenblatt model to three-phase systems considering dynamic effects in both relative permeability and capillary pressure functions. We compare the solution of the Riemann's problem when non-equilibrium effects are included. While equilibrium formulation develops unstable oscillatory solution in the elliptic region, non-equilibrium solution is smooth and stable. The results of this work might be helpful to better understanding the... 

In this work a generalized non-equilibrium model of three-phase flow in porous media including gravity as well as capillary terms is developed and used for analysis of Riemann's problem in several three-phase systems. The proposed model uses the extension of Barenblatt model to three-phase systems considering dynamic effects in both relative permeability and capillary pressure functions. We compare the solution of the Riemann's problem when non-equilibrium effects are included. While equilibrium formulation develops unstable oscillatory solution in the elliptic region, non-equilibrium solution is smooth and stable. The results of this work might be helpful to better understanding the... 

This work concerns with developing a non-equilibrium model of gravity drainage in a single block. The proposed model which considers both non-equilibrium effects of capillary pressure and relative permeabilities is used for prediction of oil recovery by gravity drainage from a single block. Close agreement observed between the model results and experimental data disclosed that the non-equilibrium assumption is completely reliable for modeling of gravity drainage. The results revealed that when the characteristic time of the saturation variation is comparable with the time required to establish capillary equilibrium, the non-equilibrium effects in gravity drainage must be considered. The... 

In this study, maleic anhydride grafted polypropylene microporous flat-sheet membranes were prepared via a thermally induced phase separation method with a mixture of dibutyl phthalate and dioctyl phthalate as a diluent. The effects of the polymer composition and coagulation bath temperature on the morphology and performance of the fabricated membranes were investigated. The hydrophilicity results of the membranes demonstrated that membrane modification reduced the water contact angle by about 45°, whereas the pure water flux was enhanced about four times. The antifouling behavior of the fabricated membranes was also investigated in a membrane bioreactor. The results show that the pure water... 

In this article a double-inlet pulse-tube refrigerator (DIPTR) is modeled using the nodal analysis technique. The main complexity of the problem is oscillatory and unsteady characteristics of the flow. Solving the flow field in the regenerator section of the system as a porous medium with nonlocal thermal equilibrium is challenging. Governing equations are developed applying mass, energy, and momentum equations to different finite volumes in each component of DIPTR. A numerical code (SharifPTR), with graphical user interface, has been developed to investigate the influence of geometrical and working parameters on performance. The governing equations are a system of boundary value problems.... 

An ensemble-based, sequential assimilation procedure is developed and successfully applied to estimate absolute and relative permeabilities jointly under multi-phase (oil, gas and water) flow condition in the porous media. Two-phase oil-water and gas-oil relative permeabilities are represented by power-law models, and Stone's Model II is used to calculate three-phase oil relative permeability. Prior absolute permeability field is also generated with isotropic Gaussian covariance. The proposed method is validated by a twin numerical setup with three different case studies, in which a synthetic 2D reservoir under multi-phase flow condition is considered. In the first case, there is... 

In this study, the ensemble Kalman filter is used to characterize threephase flow in porous media through simultaneous estimation of three-phase relative permeabilities and capillary pressures from production data. Power-law models of relative permeability and capillary pressure curves are used and the associated unknown parameters are estimated by assimilating the measured historical data. The estimation procedure is demonstrated on a twin numerical setup with two different scenarios, in which a synthetic 2D reservoir under three-phase flow is considered. In the first scenario, all the endpoints are assumed to be known and only the shape factors are estimated during the assimilation... 

In this study, impact of initial ensembles on posterior distribution of ensemble-based assimilation methods is statistically analyzed. Along with, sampling performance as well as uncertainty quantification of these methods are compared in terms of their ability to accurately and consistently evaluate unknown reservoir model parameters and reservoir future performance. For this purpose, a synthetic test problem, which is a small but highly nonlinear reservoir model under two-phase flow, is utilized. Subsequently, different initial ensemble sets are considered and are updated through the assimilation process performed on the test problem using ensemble-based assimilation methods. Afterwards,... 

In this study, ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is first applied to estimate absolute and relative permeabilities jointly under three-phase flow condition in the porous media. By assimilating historical data, absolute permeability field is adjusted progressively towards its reference. However, assimilation process does not improve the estimation of all relative permeability parameters, and some of them are poorly estimated at the end of assimilation. To improve the estimation of the relative permeability curves, we propose a new hybrid approach in which the estimation process of the absolute and relative permeabilities is separated. In this approach, gridblock permeabilities are again estimated... 

Ensemble-based assimilation methods are the most promising tools for dynamic characterization of reservoir models. However, because of inherent assumption of Gaussianity, these methods are not directly applicable to channelized reservoirs wherein the distribution of petrophysical properties is multimodal. Transformation of facies field to level set functions have been proposed to alleviate the problem of multimodality. Level set representation ensures that the estimated fields are facies realizations as well as no modification of the assimilation method is required. Moreover, due to the complexity of the history matching problem in the channelized reservoirs, most researchers conventionally...