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Transport in Porous Media

, Volume 104, Issue 2, pp 349–362 | Cite as

Quantifying the Representative Size in Porous Media

  • Saeed Ovaysi
  • Mary F. Wheeler
  • Matthew Balhoff
Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

We present a new approach to quantify the representative quality of pore-scale samples of porous media. It is shown that the flow field uniformity serves as a reliable criterion to decide if the computed flow properties are representative at larger sample sizes. The proposed approach is computationally inexpensive and requires minimal effort to implement. We rely on the correlation matrix of flow field to quantify the representative quality of the computed flow properties at the pore scale. Using this approach, we have been able to study several pore-networks and a high-resolution image of a sandstone, and quickly answer if the computed flow properties from these pore-networks/images are representative of the actual media.

Keywords

Porous media Pore-scale modeling REV Network modeling  Direct pore-scale modeling 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This research was partly supported by the financial support from the Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security (CFSES) at The University of Texas at Austin under U.S. Department of Energy contract DE-SC0001114. Professor Martin J. Blunt from Imperial College and Hu Dong from iRock Technologies are gratefully thanked for sharing their network and micro-CT data with us.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Saeed Ovaysi
    • 1
  • Mary F. Wheeler
    • 1
  • Matthew Balhoff
    • 2
  1. 1.Institute for Computational Engineering and SciencesThe University of Texas at AustinAustinUSA
  2. 2.Department of Petroleum and Geosystems EngineeringThe University of Texas at AustinAustinUSA

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