Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
A Fractal Model for Capillary Pressure of Porous Media
Boqi Xiao and Lingxia Chen
Department of Physics and Electromechanical Engineering, Sanming University, Sanming 365004, China
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2013 4:593-597
Received: August 24, 2012 | Accepted: September 19, 2012 | Published: June 20, 2013
Abstract
Capillary pressure is a basic parameter in the study of the behavior of porous media containing two or more immiscible fluid phases. In this study, the capillary pressure of porous media is predicted based on based on fractal property of pore in porous media. The formula of calculating the capillary pressure of porous media is given. The capillary pressure of porous media is expressed as a function of porosity, fractal dimension of pore and saturation. Based on the parametric effect analysis, we conclude that the capillary pressure of porous media is negatively correlated with the porosity and saturation. Besides, it is shown that the capillary pressure of unsaturated porous media decreases with the increase of saturation. No additional empirical constant is introduced. This model contains less empirical constants than the conventional correlations. The model predictions are compared with the existing experimental data and good agreement between the model predictions and experimental data is found. The validity of the present fractal model is thus verified.
Keywords:
Capillary pressure, fractal, porosity, porous media, saturation,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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