Reservoir Engineering: Three-Fluid Relative Permeabilities

With oil, brine and gas co-existing in petroleum reservoirs,

while each fluid inhibiting the flow of the other two;

and with wetting and non-wetting phases of relative permeabilities not being single-valued functions of saturation (exhibiting hysteresis),

would it remain feasible to measure three-fluid relative permeabilities directly @ laboratory-scale?

If not, how approximate would the extrapolation of

two-fluid relative permeability data to deduce three-fluid models

(as the pore-scale geometry of oil-brine interface undergoes characteristically different changes when the wetting-phase saturation increases than when it decreases)?

Why does imbibition require less energy than drainage, given the fact that the capillary pressure remains to be lower, when saturation changes in the imbibition direction than when it changes in the drainage direction?

Dr Suresh Kumar Govindarajan,

Professor [HAG],

IIT-Madras

25-Feb-2025