Assessment of the theoretical models of effective thermal conductivity based on digital rock physics for clean sandstones

Knowledge of the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of porous media provides valuable insights into the heat flow and profoundly affects the feasibility analysis of thermal enhanced oil recovery methods and geothermal field development. Theoretical assessment of ETC based on structural properties of the porous medium and various simplification assumptions by prediction models have shown acceptable results towards ETC quantification; however, their applicability must be investigated further due to the availability of various types of such models. In this study, we first employed a digital rock approach to simulate the heat conductivity of micro-CT images of 10 clean sandstone samples using Avizo software in different directions for evacuated, air-saturated, and water-saturated conditions. The filtered and segmented images were applied to perform voxel-based ETC simulations under steady state condition. Then, the simulation results were compared to the computed ETCs for each sample by 11 theoretical models. Two well-known thermal conductivity bounds, i.e., Hashin and Shtrikman bounds and Wiener bounds were used to confirm the validity of models and simulation outputs. It was shown that the Haung model generates the best outputs for vacuum (MAPE = 0.08 and RMSE = 0.37) and air-saturated (MAPE = 0.07 and RMSE = 0.32) states. While the water-saturated condition was competently predicted by the Ribaud model (MAPE = 0.05 and RMSE = 0.31). The overall analysis indicated that the Haung model is the best model for the prediction of ETC in all three pore-filling states for clean sandstones.