A Pore Network Approach to Study Throat Size Effect on the Permeability of Reconstructed Porous Media

Permeability is usually considered to be related to porosity. However, rocks with the same porosity may have different permeabilities in some cases, because of the variations in pore and throat size and pore space connectivity. It is vitally important to understand the effect of throat size on the transport property. In this work, five sets of regular pore network models and six core-based models are employed to study the effect of throat size on permeability. Four kinds of random distributions, i.e., uniform, normal, Weibull, and log normal, are utilized to generate random pore size. Pore coordination number is set to be two and six for the verification of the effect of connectivity on permeability. Then, single-phase flow simulation is conducted based on the constructed pore network models. The simulation results show that permeability decreases significantly when only one of the nine throats reduces to half size in terms of diameter. The influence of pore coordination number on permeability is not obvious compared to that of small throat size. This study indicates that small throats play an extremely important role in determining permeability.

Automated summary

The study found that throat size has a significant impact on rock permeability, with permeability decreasing significantly when one of the nine throats reduces to half size. Compared to pore coordination number, small throat size has a more obvious influence on permeability.