Scaling Water-Oil Imbibition in Fractured Reservoirs

This thesis studies the imbibition of oil from fractured reservoir matrix blocks in the absence of gravity effects using a numerical simulator. The rate of capillary imbibition is scaled by a set of dimensionless numbers governed by the physical properties of the matrix blocks, for both incompressible and slightly compressible fluid flow. A new scaling procedure for physical problems is , introduced. Sensitivity studies are performed for the incompressible case to observe the effects of dimensionless numbers on the oil recovery from individual matrix blocks, and validate these numbers for the given physical system. Finally, the resulting dimensionless groups are combined with the flow in fractures and a global scaling group is obtained to study the production behaviour of a fractured reservoir.