Porcolation: An Invasion Percolation Model for Mercury Porosimetry

Abstract

Mercury porosimetry is utilized primarily in the oil industry to determine the pore size distribution of rock samples. During the process, mercury is forced into the sample with gradually increasing pressure and the volume of the injected mercury is measured vs. the applied pressure (the saturation curve). In practice, the saturation curve is assumed to be directly related the cumulative pore size distribution. However, this distribution does not coincide with the real one because of the “nonaccessibility” of pores at a given pressure. This motivates our goal to determine a more accurate cumulative pore size distribution. To achieve this, we treat the propagation of mercury as a percolation process (dubbed “porcolation” after PORosimetry perCOLATION). Porcolation is an external pressure-driven access-limited invasion percolation model where resistance values are assigned to sites/vertices. As pressure increases, the invading mercury occupies sites with smaller resistance values along paths that are connected to the “boundaries” of the network. Simulations are carried out on regular lattices, as well as on random graphs with prescribed degree distributions (representing the pore network of rock samples). An assumed pore size distribution is considered as an input/parameter of the simulations resulting in an output saturation curve. We determine the input–output mapping (homeomorphism) and utilize its inverse to correct the discrepancies between the assumed and actual pore size distributions. The results show nice agreement between experimental saturation curves and those obtained from our homeomorphism method.