Study on the effect of polymer viscosity and Darcy velocity on relative permeability curves in polymer flooding

Abstract Relative permeability curves in polymer flooding are important parameters to reflect the two-phase flow performance in reservoir rocks, which have important application in numerical simulation, reservoir engineering and prediction of crude oil production. Although the researches on the relative permeability curves in polymer flooding have made some progress at present, the relative permeability curves used in these researches are generally obtained by traditional experiment methods (steady-state method and unsteady-state method) or microscopic pore-scale modeling method. However, these methods are incapable of considering the physicochemical properties (i.e. rheology, residual resistance factor, adsorption and diffusion) of polymer completely. In this paper, a numerical inversion method based on automatic history matching is used to determine relative permeability curves in polymer flooding. The method performs automatic history matching by Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm on the unsteady-state experimental results and the predicted results of the numerical simulation model. As the physic-chemical properties of polymer solution have been fully taken into account in the numerical simulation model by far, the method makes up for the shortcomings of the traditional methods. Based on the inversed relative permeability curves, the effects of polymer viscosity and Darcy velocity in the rheo-thinning regime on relative permeability curves are then studied respectively. The results show that polymer viscosity and Darcy velocity in the rheo-thinning regime have little influence on the shape of oil relative permeability curve, but have obvious influence on the shape of water relative permeability curve. The deviation between the water relative permeability curve of polymer flooding and the one of water flooding increases linearly with the increase of polymer viscosity and decreases in power function with the increase of Darcy velocity in the rheo-thinning regime. At last, the prediction model of relative permeability curves under the influence of polymer viscosity and Darcy velocity in the rheo-thinning regime is established by multiple nonlinear regression method. The verification results show that this prediction model is reliable and can be used to predict the relative permeability curves at different polymer viscosities and Darcy velocities in the rheo-thinning regime.