Extension of Methodology for the Determination of Two-phase Porous Media Property Functions

This article addresses estimation of porous media property functions, absolute and relative permeabilities, from experiments on core samples. Typically, the properties are taken to be homogeneous. However, recent studies have shown that such an assumption frequently is erroneous, and may indeed lead to large errors in the estimated properties. The property functions are inaccessible to direct measurements, and have to be estimated through an inverse problem. This article describes an algorithm capable of successfully determining the property functions, taking the heterogeneous nature of the porous medium into account. In this article, this methodology is extended in two ways - the estimation algorithm is made more robust and saturation data have been included. Also, for the first time, experimental data are used for verification purposes.