Effects of Wettability on Relative Permeability of Immiscible flow in Rough-walled Fractures

Here, we use real fracture geometries subjected to a high normal stress to investigate the effect of wettability condition on the relative permeability of immiscible fluids. It was shown that by increasing the contact angle from 0 to 90 degree, in contrast to the wetting fluid, the relative permeability for the non-wetting phase increases as a result of the reduction in the capillary pressure. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the effect of wettability is more prominent for the geometries where the apertures have a strong spatial correlation. In these cases, due to a higher capillary pressure, there is a higher chance for the fluids to be trapped and as a result the relative permeability curves deviate more from the linear model.