Measurements of Relative Permeabilities for Water and Steam

Abstract

Relative permeabilities are important parameters when determining the characteristics of two phase flow of geothermal fluids through porous reservoirs. When modeling such flow, several choices for relative permeability curves are available and thus they must be chosen by the modeler. This choice is however not always straightforward and results may differ quite a lot based on the selected curves. To shed light on the appliccability of different relative permeability curves, a measurement device has been designed and constructed which operates on a two phase mixture of water and steam for a specific pressure range. It has been used for measuring the necessary flow parameters needed to determine the relative permeabilities for different pressures, different flow directions and can be operated with different types of filling materials with different intrinsic permeability. The relative permeabilities were calculated according to Darcy’s law in both vertical and horizontal setups from the measurements of the total mass flow of the two phases and their pressure gradients. The results are presented as experimental values of relative permeabilities for water and steam for different alignments in gravitational field.