A Physically Based Approach for Estimating Hydraulic Conductivity from HPT Pressure and Flowrate
Robert C Borden1, Ki Young Cha2, Gaisheng Liu3
1North Carolina State University, Campus Box 7908, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA.
Abstract:
The hydraulic profiling tool (HPT) is widely used to generate profiles of relative permeability vs. depth. In this work, prior numerical modeling results are used to develop a relationship between probe advance rate V (cm/s), probe diameter D (cm), water injection rate Q (mL/min), corrected pressure Pc (psi), and hydraulic conductivity K (feet/d) [Formula: see text] where E is an empirically derived hydraulic efficiency factor. The relationship is validated by 23 HPT profiles that, after averaging K vertically, were similar to slug test results in adjoining monitoring wells. The best fit value of E for these profiles was 2.02. This equation provides a physically based approach for generating hydraulic conductivity profiles with HPT tooling.
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