Effects of heterogeneity of porous media and wettability on forced imbibition

Imbibition, the wetting fluid displacing a nonwetting one, occurs in many natural and industrial applications, such as enhanced oil recovery and CO2 sequestration. The imbibition process is highly affected by wettability, viscosity ratio and injection flow rates, and the competition between these factors become more complicated when the heterogeneity of porous media is involved. In this work, forced imbibition in two-dimensional porous media is systematically investigated with different disorders over a broad range of wettability conditions and flow rates. Results show that the disorder and the wettability have different impacts on the imbibition process under different capillary numbers.