Characterizing the evolution of porosity and permeability in porous media undergoing pressure solution creep.

This work looks at the change in pore-scale morphological properties such as porosity and permeability using modeled sphere packs. The effects of varying pressure, temperature, and stress upon these properties are evaluated in numerically derived sphere packs undergoing creep and elastic compaction processes. This thesis will utilize the abilities of the lattice Boltzmann method and the network model method to determine various morphological properties of these sets of packed spheres. The results from these two methods can be combined to further analyze the relationship between pore space morphology and fluid flow parameters in porous media that can be used to develop correlations to predict permeability based upon the physical structure of the pore space.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Swanberg, Cassandra

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Christopher Leonardi, Jesse Kroll, and Brian Evans.

• Chemical Engineering.
• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115465

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/115465