2005/11/30 by T.A. Ramstad, Thomas Ramstad, Alex Hansen · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques #Hydrocarbon exploration and reservoir analysis #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.73.026306
published as Phys. Rev. E 73, 026306 (2006) · 12 pages, 11 figures. Minor corrections. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E
arxiv created 2006/01/05 · openalex publication_date 2006/02/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report numerical studies of the cluster development of two-phase flow in a steady-state environment of porous media. This is done by including biperiodic boundary conditions in a two-dimensional flow simulator. Initial transients of wetting and nonwetting phases that evolve before steady state has occurred, undergo a crossover where every initial pattern is broken up. For flow dominated by capillary effects with capillary numbers in order of 10(-5), we find that around a critical saturation of nonwetting fluid the nonwetting clusters of size have a power-law distribution ns similar to s(-tau)with the exponent tau=1.92+/-0.04 for large clusters. This is a lower value than the result for ordinary percolation. We also present scaling relation and time evolution of the structure and global pressure.