Speaker
Description
Waterflooding in fracture–vug media is frequently dominated by preferential flow through fractures, resulting in strong channeling, early water breakthrough, limited sweep efficiency, and high residual oil. Although visual experiments have been widely used to illustrate these behaviors, quantitative understanding of how fracture aperture controls breakthrough and recovery—especially at the network scale—remains insufficient and is often unsupported by experimentally validated numerical models. This study integrates visual waterflooding experiments with COMSOL-based two-phase flow simulations to quantify the impact of fracture aperture on displacement dynamics and oil recovery. Waterflooding tests are conducted in a single fracture–vug model under multiple injection rates and fracture apertures, and a corresponding COMSOL two-phase model is developed using experimentally constrained fluid properties and boundary conditions; model validation is performed by comparing both interfacial-front evolution and recovery–pore-volume (PV) curves between experiments and simulations. Based on the validated model, a systematic aperture sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate its effects on breakthrough PV (PVbt), ultimate recovery (Rf), and residual-oil morphology. The workflow is then extended to a fracture–vug network, where network-scale waterflooding experiments are reproduced numerically to enable direct comparison of sweep patterns, breakthrough behavior, pressure drop (ΔP), and recovery, followed by controlled aperture variations to reveal how aperture distribution governs channelization strength and sweep efficiency. The proposed experimental–numerical framework provides a scalable approach to link fracture aperture to key performance indicators (PVbt, Rf, sweep efficiency, and ΔP), offering practical insights for interpreting and optimizing waterflooding performance in fracture–vug systems.
| Country | Saudi Arabia |
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