Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Methods for Interpreting Displacement Data

The Johnson-Bossler-Naumann (JBN) and related methods for interpreting displacement experiments provide explicit, or pointwise, estimates of relative permeability that must be interpolated or smoothed when entire relative permeability functions are desired. In this paper, we compare relative permeability functions obtained with an implicit (regression-based) method with those estimated with explicit values. We show that the functions obtained with the regression-based method are most consistent with the measured data.