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The electrical conductivity of porous dielectric materials saturated with water is usually determined by the bulk water conduction. However, the unsaturated state can be affected by a water film covering the unsaturated grain surface. Thus far, a few studies have been conducted on the study of the electrical conductivity with respect to water film covering the grain surface. In this study, the electrical conductivities of the Shirasu porous glass with three different uniform pore sizes (1.0, 0.5, and 0.2 μ m ) soaked in various NaCl solutions (0.001, 0.01, and 0.1 mol L - 1 ) were measured using an impedance meter while being dried at different water saturations. The resulting complex conductivities were fitted by a three-component Cole–Cole model to obtain Cole–Cole parameters. The conductivity values in these parameters were compared with the calculated conductivity values using tortuosities of surface and bulk conduction obtained from two different circuit models. The parallel model of bulk and surface water conduction could not reproduce accurate experimental results; however, the parallel plus series model, including the series connection of water film and bulk water around the meniscus, produced better results. This new model is expected to provide an improved quantitative evaluation of the electrical conductivity of unsaturated porous materials. Article Highlights: Electrical conductivity of the Shirasu porous glass at different water saturations was measured. The relationship between tortuosity of bulk and surface, and water saturation was obtained. A new model was proposed for explaining experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrokinetic and electroosmotic couplings can play important roles in water and ions transport in charged porous media. Electroosmosis is the phenomena explaining the water movement in a porous medium subjected to an electrical field. In this work, a new model is obtained through a new up-scaling procedure, considering the porous medium as a bundle of tortuous capillaries of fractal nature. From the model, the expressions for the electroosmosis pressure coefficient, the relative electroosmosis pressure coefficient, the maximum back pressure, the maximum flow rate, the flow rate-applied back pressure relation and the product of the permeability and formation factor of porous media are also obtained. The sensitivity of the relative electroosmosis pressure coefficient is then analyzed and explained. The model predictions are then successfully compared with published datasets. Additionally, we deduce an expression for the relative streaming potential coefficient and then compare it with a previously published model and experimental data from a dolomite rock sample. We find a good agreement between those models and experimental data, opening up new perspectives to model electroosmotic phenomena in porous media saturated with various fluids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relative permeability of gas gains great significance in exploring unconventional gas. This paper developed a universal relative permeability model of gas, which is applicable for unconventional gas reservoirs such as coal, tight sandstone and shale. The model consists of the absolute relative permeability of gas and the gas slippage permeability. In the proposed model, the effects of water saturation and mean pore pressure on gas slippage permeability are taken into account. Subsequently, the evaluation of the model with existing model is done and then the validation of the model is made with data of tight sandstones, coals and shales from published literatures. The modeling results illustrate that a strong power-law relationship between relative permeability of gas and water saturation and the contribution of gas slippage permeability to relative permeability is determined by water saturation and mean pore pressure simultaneously. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis of the impact of the parameters in the model is conducted and their effects are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Permeability is the most important parameter that describes gas flow characteristics in shale. Water saturation and effective pressure have a considerable effect on shale permeability. This paper presents the results of a laboratory study of the effects of water saturation and effective pressure on gas permeability in Carboniferous shales of the Qaidam Basin, China. The permeability of shale samples with varying water saturation (0-33 wt%) was measured at effective pressure of 6.9 to 27.59 MPa and at low mean pore pressure (< 6.89 MPa) at room temperature, using a pressure pulse decay permeameter. The results indicate that the water saturation and the effective pressure are the main factors affecting the shale permeability. Permeability of sample C034, which has a high clay content and is dominated by nanoscale slit-shaped pores, shows a large decrease (up to 90%) with increasing water saturation (from 0 to 31.7 wt%), depending on the effective pressure. A much larger permeability reduction with increasing water saturation fraction is associated with the swelling of clay minerals. For each sample with varying water saturation, our analyses revealed a consistent line relationship between log permeability and effective pressure variation. The impact of effective pressure on the measured permeability becomes more significant as water saturation increases. With increasing water saturation, the gas slippage factor decreases and calculated effective pore size increases, and gas-water flow in the shale samples occurs as channel flow. This study provides practical information for further studies of stress-dependent permeability of shale with water and the gas slippage effect in two-phase, gas-water flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oil-water relative permeability curve constitutes important basic data in reservoir engineering. Given the influence of dead volume on experimental apparatus, the actual oil-water relative permeability curve cannot be obtained when the unsteady-state method is adopted to measure oil-water relative permeability. In this paper, on the basis of the analysis of the influence of dead volume on oil-water relative permeability, we summarize the conventional methods used to overcome dead volume and then propose the use of relationship theory between resistivity and water saturation to calibrate the oil-water relative permeability curve. This method mainly aims at to measure the resistance values at both ends of the core by using a resistance-measuring instrument. Meantime, the Archie formula is used to calibrate the relational expression of core resistivity and water saturation based on the steady-state experimental method. Therefore, the core of the actual cumulative oil production and the average water saturation can be calculated, and then oil-water relative permeability can be accurately computed without the influence of dead volume. By comparing the oil displacement process of dead volume calculated through two different methods (probability subtraction and resistivity methods), the crude oil in dead volume is found to be displaced at the beginning of the displacement. The oil-water relative permeability curve corrected through resistivity method can eliminate the influence of dead volume and iterative error in calculation, and is consistent with the law of the actual development of oilfield, which has certain theoretical and practical application values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden changes in isotopic tracer concentration in pore waters have been interpreted as indicating barriers to vertical advective flow through porous rocks in the subsurface, e.g. step changes in $$^{87}\hbox {Sr}/^{86}$$ Sr ratio are often used in the oil and gas industry as a signature of reservoir compartmentalisation. This study shows that this is not necessarily the case. It can take millions of years for such step changes to equilibrate by diffusion if there is no flow resulting from pressure or density gradients even in high permeability, high porosity rocks, particularly if the water saturation is low. Changes in tracer concentration gradients can be good indicators of changes in porosity (or water saturation) between layers. In contrast changes in sorption without a change in porosity are almost impossible to identify. The time taken for concentration gradients to equilibrate is affected by the layer properties but can be quickly estimated from the harmonic average of the effective diffusion coefficient for each layer and a simple analytical expression for a homogeneous system. This was achieved by performing a sensitivity analysis on different layer properties (porosity contrast, saturation contrast, sorption contrast, thickness ratio) using existing analytical solutions for diffusion in layered systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microbes play an important role in facilitating organic matter decomposition in soils, which is a major component of the global carbon cycle. Microbial dynamics are intimately coupled to environmental transport processes, which control access to labile organic matter and other nutrients that are needed for the growth and maintenance of microorganisms. Transport of soluble nutrients in the soil system is arguably most strongly impacted by preferential flow pathways in the soil. Since the physical structure of soils can be characterized as being formed from constituent micro-aggregates which contain internal porosity, one pressing question is the partitioning of the flow among the 'inter-aggregate' and 'intra-aggregate' pores and how this may impact overall solute transport within heterogeneous soil structures. The answer to this question is particularly important in evaluating assumptions to be used in developing upscaled simulations based on highly resolved mechanistic models. In our synthetic model of soils, firstly we statistically generated a number of micro-aggregates containing internal pores. Then we constructed a group of diverse multi-aggregate structures with different packing ratios by stacking those micro-aggregates and varying the size and shape of inter-aggregate pore spacing between them. We then performed pore-scale flow simulations using computational fluid dynamics methods to determine the flow patterns in these aggregate-of-aggregates structures and computed the partitioning of the flow through intra- and inter-aggregate pores as a function of the spacing between the aggregates. The results of these numerical experiments demonstrate that soluble nutrients are largely transported via flows through inter-aggregate pores. Although this result is consistent with intuition, we have also been able to quantify the relative flow capacity of the two domains under various conditions. For example, in our simulations, the flow capacity through the aggregates (intra-aggregate flow) was less than 2 % of the total flow when the spacing between the aggregates was larger than $$18\,\upmu \hbox {m}$$ . Inter-aggregate pores continued to be the dominant flow pathways even at much smaller spacing; intra-aggregate flow was less than 10 % of the total flow when the inter- and intra-aggregate pore sizes were comparable. Although the results may not be exactly the same as those obtained from actual soil systems, such studies are making it possible to identify which model upscaling assumptions are realistic and what computational methods are required for detailed numerical investigation of hydrodynamics and microbial carbon cycling dynamics in soil systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centrifuge method is commonly used to determine the capillary pressure of a porous medium, and the original approximating method for data analysis developed by Hassler and Brunner is still being used. Its limitations are, however, not well understood. Application to analyze experiments where one of the assumptions was obviously violated had been given in the literature. While the result appeared to be quite reasonable, it was not clear how close was it to reality. One of the objectives of this paper is to review the assumptions that is required to develop this method, so that the experimental condition in which it is applicable can be established. The other objective is to derive a completely different solution technique to this problem. There is no need to assume that the ratio of the inlet radius to the exit radius of the core to the center of the centrifuge be close to 1. With the freedom from this limitation it is, therefore, possible to construct machines at lower cost and to improve on the data quality by allowing longer cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]