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Relative permeabilities of supercritical CO2 and brine in carbon sequestration by a two-phase lattice Boltzmann method

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Abstract

In this paper, the migration of supercritical carbon dioxide (\(\hbox {CO}_{2}\)) in realistic sandstone rocks under conditions of saline aquifers, with applications to the carbon geological storage, has been investigated by a two-phase lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). Firstly the digital images of sandstone rocks were reproduced utilizing the X-ray computed microtomography (micro-CT), and high resolutions (up to 2.5 μm) were applied to the pore-scale LBM simulations. For the sake of numerical stability, the digital images were “cleaned” by closing the dead holes and removing the suspended particles in sandstone rocks. In addition, the effect of chemical reactions occurred in the carbonation process on the permeability was taken into account. For the wetting brine and non-wetting supercritical \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) flows, they were treated as the immiscible fluids and were driven by pressure gradients in sandstone rocks. Relative permeabilities of brine and supercritical \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) in sandstone rocks were estimated. Particularly the dynamic saturation was applied to improve the reliability of the calculations of the relative permeabilities. Moreover, the effects of the viscosity ratio of the two immiscible fluids and the resolution of digital images on the relative permeability were systematically investigated.

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Acknowledgements

The authors were grateful to the financial support from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council of the UK (Grant No. EP/I010971/1). J.F.X thanks the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51506110) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2015M581090) for the support. Y.Q.Z thanks the support of Shanghai Pujiang Programme (Grant No. 14PJ1401600) and Fudan University Initiative Scientific Research Programme (Grant No. EZH2126504). J.F.X also thanks Professor Moran Wang from Tsinghua University for the very useful discussions about the carbon geological storage, and we gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. Jian.-Fei. Xie

    Present address: School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK

    Jian.-Fei. Xie & S. He

  2. Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Y. Q. Zu

  3. School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    B. Lamy-Chappuis & B. W. D. Yardley

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  1. Jian.-Fei. Xie
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Correspondence to Jian.-Fei. Xie.

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Xie, JF., He, S., Zu, Y.Q. et al. Relative permeabilities of supercritical CO2 and brine in carbon sequestration by a two-phase lattice Boltzmann method. Heat Mass Transfer 53, 2637–2649 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00231-017-2007-6

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