A NOVEL TWO-PARAMETER RELATIVE PERMEABILITY MODEL

The relative permeability curves are key factors for assessment of reservoir performance by numerical simulators. The widely used one-parameter models are not sufficiently flexible for fitting laboratory measured relative permeability data. These models only show a concave upward trend and cannot represent the S-shape behavior of relative permeability. The other three-parameter models are too complex to use in practical reservoir engineering calculations. In this paper, a novel two-parameter model is proposed that maintains the simplicity of previous models while having great flexibility over a full range of saturation. The two parameters L and U control the shape of the lower and upper part of the curve, respectively; hence it is called the LU model. For testing its strength, relative permeabilities from literature are fitted with LU. The comparison results show that LU models are more accurate than previous one- and two-parameter models and that their performance is almost as good as three-parameter LET models.