Spatial Correlation of Contact Angle and Curvature in Pore‐Space Images

We study the in situ distributions of contact angle and oil/brine interface curvature measured within millimeter‐sized rock samples from a producing hydrocarbon carbonate reservoir imaged after waterflooding using X‐ray microtomography. We analyze their spatial correlation combining automated methods for measuring contact angles and interfacial curvature (AlRatrout et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.07.018 ), with a recently developed method for pore‐network extraction (Raeini et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.96.013312 ). The automated methods allow us to study image volumes of diameter approximately 1.9 mm and 1.2 mm long, obtaining hundreds of thousands of values from a data set with 435 million voxels. We calculate the capillary pressure based on the mode oil/brine interface curvature value and associate this value with a nearby throat in the pore space. We demonstrate the capability of our methods to distinguish different wettability states in the samples studied: water‐wet, weakly oil‐wet, and mixed‐wet. The contact angle and oil/brine interface curvature are spatially correlated over approximately the scale of an average pore. There is a wide distribution of contact angles within a single pore. A range of local oil/brine interface curvature is found with both positive and negative values. There is a correlation between interfacial curvature and contact angle in trapped ganglia, with ganglia in water‐wet patches tending to have a positive curvature and oil‐wet regions seeing negative curvature. We observed a weak correlation between average contact angle and pore size, with the larger pores tending to be more oil‐wet.