It depends on what you want to study.

If the flow rate is very low in flooding experiments in the laboratory, experimental artifacts may become important and it is then important to be able to correct for these artifacts. Depending on the equipment that is used, it can also be difficult to measure differential pressure and production of phases with high accuracy at very low flow rates.

Mr Fjelde, with all your respect; so you mean the flow rate could be scaled from field to lab conditions more accurately if the rate is high preferably? but do you know about any speficic procedure to do it? maybe a mathematical one. Btw, Norway's research is always so good!

From a fundamental perspective there is no reason to "scale" a flow rate from field to laboratory, because the flow regimes should not change if you change the size of the porous media sample. Having said this, there are more detailed reasons, i.e. the sample should not be shorter than the length scale of individual non-wetting phase clusters, which can be up to mm-cm in length, we usually take samples from 5 cm in length as acceptable.

Having said this, Ingebret Fjelde is certainly correct in saying that there are experimental artifacts like the capillary end-effect (which can be 1-2 cm in length) that can play a significant role (depending on wetting properties) for 5 cm long samples in the laboratory but not in the reservoir. One possible solution is to increase the flow rate up to a capillary number of 10^-5 (from which on capillary de-saturation can occur).

Christian,

this is a very good question - but very complicated: You should follow other modeling experiments in hydrodynamics and keep attention on the Reynolds Number. The problem is that you have too much different parameter like pressure, velocity, viscosity, permeability and adhesion. I am dreaming since years from "a" Reynolds Number which helps to transform down hole conditions to lab conditions like you do it in aerodynamics with flow models. Just try to eliminate and reduce the number of parameters and buy a very big computer !! Good Luck.

Regards

Paul