Inertial Effects During the Process of Supercritical CO2 Displacing Brine in a Sandstone: Lattice Boltzmann Simulations Based on the Continuum-Surface-Force and Geometrical Wetting Models

Inertial effects during the process of supercritical CO2 displacing brine in porous media may not be negligible according to recent studies. Capturing the inertial effects of the physical CO2-brine system imposes a requirement on the grid resolution and viscosity to surface tension ratio for pore-scale simulations, which some commonly used simulators may not be able to meet. To fulfill the parameter requirement, we combine the continuum-surface-force based color-gradient lattice Boltzmann (LB) multiphase model and the geometrical wetting model and extend the model to 3D under the multiple-relaxation-time framework. We validate the model via simple benchmarks which show significant improvement over the traditional models. We then perform 3D drainage simulations in a heterogeneous micromodel where the simulation result agrees well with experimental data, while our previous work fails to reproduce certain displacement patterns in the experiment due to the use of a traditional LB model that cannot fulfill the parameter requirement. Finally, we perform high-fidelity 3D drainage simulations to study the inertial effects in a Bentheimer sandstone sample. Our results show that stronger inertial effects generally help develop more CO2 flow pathways for the same capillary number which results in higher CO2 saturation, consistent with the micromodel results. The phenomena can be found in both low and high capillary number cases, indicating that the inertial effects are not dependent on the mean velocity. In addition, the change of the invasion patterns is not proportional to the change of inertial effects, thus exhibiting threshold behavior.