Wetting-phase relative permeability in porous media with bi-modal pore size distributions

Abstract

Modeling fluid flow in dual-porosity media with bi-modal pore size distributions has practical applications to understanding transport in multi-scale systems such as natural soils. Dual-porosity media are typically formed of two domains: (1) structure and (2) texture. The former mainly incorporates macropores, while the latter contains micropores. Although there exist models based on the series-parallel tubes approach, here we apply concepts from critical path analysis, a theoretical technique from statistical physics, to estimate water relative permeability (krw) in dual-porosity media. For this purpose, we use two datasets from the literature collected under two different cultivation conditions: (i) conventional tillage (CT) and (ii) non-tillage (NT). Each dataset consists of 13 soil samples for which capillary pressure curve and water relative permeability were measured at 500 data point over a wide range of water saturation. We estimate the water relative permeability from the measured capillary pressure curve using two methods: (1) critical path analysis (CPA), and (2) series-parallel tubes (vG-M), both models adapted for dual-porosity media. Comparing the theoretical estimations with the experimental measurements shows that CPA resulted in more accurate krw estimations than vG-M. We demonstrate that precise estimation of krw via CPA requires accurate characterization of capillary pressure curve and precise determination of the crossover point separating the structure domain from the texture one.