Diffusion in porous structures containing three fluid phases

In the present study, the tracer diffusion in porous media filled by three fluid phases (a non-wetting, an intermediate wetting and a wetting phase) is investigated. The disordered porous structure of porous systems like random sphere packing and the North Sea chalk, is represented by three-dimensional binary images. The random sphere pack is generated by a standard ballistic deposition procedure, while the chalk matrix by a stochastic reconstruction technique. Physically sound spatial distributions of the three phases filling the pore space are determined by the use of a simulated annealing algorithm, where those phases are initially randomly distributed in the pore space and trial-and-error swaps are performed in order to attain the global minimum of the total interfacial energy. The acceptance rule for a trial move during the annealing is modified properly improving the efficiency of the technique. The diffusivities of the resulting domains are computed by a random walk method. A parametric study with respect to the pore volume fraction occupied by each fluid phase and the ratio of the diffusivities in the fluid phases is performed. (authors)