Flow in porous media described by Darcy’s law extended to two-phase flow using the concept of relative permeabilities
k
r
naturally assumes a maximum value of 0 ≤
k
r
≤ 1. Reports in literature and our own experimental data show endpoint relative permeabilities
k
r
> 1. In the porous medium, the flux of the non-wetting phase is in many cases about 2-4 times higher when a small amount
of the wetting phase is present. Here, we draw an analogy between
k
r
> 1 and a
slip-boundary condition for the pore scale flow. We use a model description assuming flow in capillary tubes with a slip boundary condition. This
model predicts that the flux increase due to slip depends on the equivalent capillary radius of the flow channels. Our
k
r
data specifically follows this dependence indicating that slip is a plausible explanation for the observation of
k
r
> 1.
Keywords Two-phase flow - Wetting - Relative permeability > 1 - Slip model - Special core analysis