Numerical Modelling of Oil-Water Immiscible Flow and Heat Transfer in a Porous Media

A numerical investigation of temperature and hot water injection rate into an oil saturated sandstone core sample is reported in this paper. The Eulerian-Mixture model was used to simulate a 3D cylindrical core sample of predetermined intrinsic permeability and porosity. Warm water was injected at three different injection rate of 2.94×10^6 m/s, 4.41×10^6 m/s and 5.88×10^6 m/s into a 63 °C core sample, whose permeability and porosity was 14 mD and 26% respectively. The process was repeated with the same injection rates and core temperature, but with water injection temperature of 90 °C into the core sample. Using this approach, the relative permeability of the fluid, the effect of temperature variations and flow rate on relative permeability were evaluated. The results indicated that oil relative permeability curves are largely dependent on the flow rate, but showed no change in the relative permeability of water. The impact of the flow rate on oil and water residual saturations and effective permeability was also analysed. In addition, there were no sensitivity of relative permeability with temperature range between 20 °C to 90 °C. The study also demonstrated the practicability of CFD techniques in the estimation of oil-water relative permeability curve with significant impact on cost reduction compared to physical experiment.