A METHOD FOR MEASURING CAPILLARY PRESSURES AND RELATIVE PERMEABILITIES BASED UPON A TRANSIENT ANALYSIS OF A RAPID RESTORED-STATE EXPERIMENT

In this dissertation an improved method for the measurement of capillary pressure and relative permeability is presented. The new technique is a modification of the restored-state capillary pressure experiment. The modifications involve the use of thin core samples and thin plastic filtration membranes, resulting in a one hundred fold reduction in the time requirement of the experiment. The determination of relative permeability is made possible by the collection of transient data and the use of a numerical model coupled with a non-linear parameter estimation algorithm. The new method is capable of measuring wetting-phase relative permeabilities at low wetting-phase saturations.