RELATIVE PERMEABILITY HYSTERESIS

Significant amount of oil is left in the reservoir after the natural pressure of the reservoir
finishes. That's why engineers use some methods such as EOR and lOR. By using these
techniques some more oil can be produced. When we use these methods we need to
consider two- or three-phase flows very well. Even though there pretty much work has
been done about the two-phase flow, generally engineers ignore the hysteresis effect.
Ignoring hysteresis will give different results which will influence the efficiency and
performance of the process.
The purpose of the project is to conduct some experiments to calculate the relative
permeability values and observe the hysteresis effect in multiphase flow. The scope of the
report is two-phase flow, relative permeability and hysteresis effect. The methodology
consists of surfing the web, utilizing library resources, Society of Petroleum Engineers
(SPE) files, and the other articles related to fluid flow, enhanced oil recovery, relative
permeability, WAG applications and hysteresis effect and conducting set of experiments
to obtain data related to saturation and relative permeability.
The outcome of the report is that objectives were achieved. With reference to all of the
concepts elaborated in Chapter 2, some results were obtained after considering all
parameters from the several experiments. The findings were analyzed and evaluated.
From the experiments, raw data were obtained and they were used to calculate relative
permeability values. And graphs were constructed to observe the hysteresis effect.
In conclusion, the relative permeability hysteresis was observed in this experiment and it
was changing after each cycle. Obtained experimental results were compared with
previous results and they follow the same trend. The data was acceptable and sufficient to
construct the saturation versus relative permeability graphs. So hysteresis does exist in
two-phase flow and after each cycle the curves are differ from the previous curves.