Abstract: Effective or equivalent petrophysical properties obtained in the upscaling process strongly depend on the connectivity of the more conductive components (facies).

This is why a lot of effort has been devoted to characterize this connectivity, and quantify its impact on flow and transport. In this talk, we’ll discuss a numerical study over the influence of connectivity on the equivalent hydraulic conductivity (Keq) of binary media samples with different connectivity structures, using some concepts from percolation theory.

We will show that the influence of a connectivity structure on Keq is different in 2D than in 3D. Also, we will show that, in both cases, any influence of connectivity on Keq is well accounted for simply by a shift in the percolation threshold, which suggests that Keq is controlled mainly by the proximity to percolation.

Dr.Alejandro Boschan
Grupo de Medios Porosos, Facultad de Ingeniería, UBA
http://web.fi.uba.ar/~abosch/ <http://web.fi.uba.ar/~abosch/>