CONDITIONAL SIMULATIONS OF TRANSIENT TWO PHASE FLOW IN RANDOMLY HETEROGENEOUS POROUS MEDIA

This study is an extension of the stochastic analysis of transient two-phase flow in randomly heterogeneous porous media (Chen et al., 2006), by incorporating direct measurements of the random soil properties. The log-transformed intrinsic permeability, soil pore size distribution parameter, and van Genuchten fitting parameter, are treated as stochastic variables that are normally distributed with a separable exponential covariance model. These three conditional random variables with given measurements are decomposed via Karhunen-Loève expansions. Combined with the conditional eigenvalues and eigenfunctions, we use stochastic transient water-oil flow model (Chen et al., 2006) to investigate how the numbers and locations of measurement points, as well as the correlation length of random soil properties, affect the stochastic behavior of water and oil flow.