Non-Darcian flow experiments of shear-thinning fluids through rough-walled rock fractures

Abstract

Understanding non-Darcian flow of shear-thinning fluids through rough-walled rock fractures is of vital importance in a number of industrial applications such as hydrogeology or petroleum engineering. Different laws are available to express the deviations from linear Darcy law due to inertial pressure losses. In particular, Darcy’s law is often extended through addition of quadratic and cubic terms weighted by two inertial coefficients depending on the strength of the inertia regime. The relations between the effective shear viscosity of the fluid and the apparent viscosity in porous media when inertial deviations are negligible were extensively studied in the past. However, only recent numerical works have investigated the superposition of both inertial and shear-thinning effects, finding that the same inertial coefficients obtained for non-Darcian Newtonian flow applied in the case of shear-thinning fluids. The objective of this work is to experimentally validate these results, extending their applicability to the case of rough-walled rock fractures. To do so, flow experiments with aqueous polymer solutions have been conducted using replicas of natural fractures, and the effects of polymer concentration, which determine the shear rheology of the injected fluid, have been evaluated. Our findings show that the experimental pressure loss-flow rate data for inertial flow of shear-thinning fluids can be successfully predicted from the empirical parameters obtained during non-Darcian Newtonian flow and Darcian shear-thinning flow in a given porous medium.