CONSIDERATIONS AFFECTING THE SCALING OF DISPLACEMENTS IN HETEROGENEOUS PERMEABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS

Dispersion and convection scaling can be used to model 1D miscible and immiscible flows, respectively, but these scaling techniques fail in multidimensional heterogeneous permeability distributions. The length dependence observed for dispersion induced by correlated heterogeneity in miscible displacement processes precludes the definition of an effective dispersion coefficient. Effective relative permeabilities can be defined that will reproduce the results of the cross-sectional simulations from which they were derived, but complications arise when they are used in areal models.