Research Article
Miadonye A and Amadu M
Abstract
Naturally occurring hydrocarbon fluids and ground water are two major geological resources essential for both energy and domestic driven civilizations at all levels of human activities. These two resources are hosted by subsurface geologic media commonly called reservoirs or aquifers. The development and supply of these resources in a systematic and guaranteed manner requires knowledge of their subsurface environments of flow. In both ground water and petroleum engineering communities, the same diffusion type equation describes subsurface fluid flow and most importantly, the analytical solutions of these equations have been greatly exploited for both formation and resource evaluation purposes. This study uses a newly installed ground water flow unit at the Chemical Engineering Laboratory of Dalhousie University (Halifax- Nova Scotia Canada) to obtain the first ever laboratory-scaledrawdown testing data for the determination of the hydraulic conductivity of a model sand pack aquifer.Conventional plots of experimental data in this study have been found to be perfectly similar to those obtained using actual field data from field-scale drawdown testing. Accordingly, absolute permeabilities, hydraulic conductivities, skin factors and other theoretically deduced parameters based on rigorous mathematical analysis of drawdown test data have been found to be physically realistic.