Prediction of Effective Permeability in Porous Media Based on Spontaneous Imbibition Effect

Permeability is an important parameter for characterizing the transport properties (e.g. heat and mass transfer) of porous media. It is one of the crucial issues that the permeability of porous media is exactly and quickly decided in many fields such as reservoir engineering, groundwater engineering and composite material modeling. Spontaneous imbibition is a fundamental and ubiquitous natural phenomenon extensively existing in a variety of processes. In this paper, the relationships between the height and weight of imbibition versus the time are derived based on Darcy's law, and a simple method for predicting effective permeability of porous media using spontaneous imbibition effect is proposed, including expressions for permeabilities of artificial and natural porous media. The validity of the proposed models is analysed and tested by experimental data.