Preliminary study for permeability adjustment of triaxial porous ceramic media obtained by binder jetting

Among the oil reservoirs types are those constituted by sandstone-type rocks, representing 60 % of the existing reservoirs. Properties such as porosity and permeability are critical in understanding the flow of fluids inside these rocks, especially for implementing advanced oil recovery technologies (Enhanced Oil Recovery - EOR), which seek to recover/extract as much as possible oil from these rocks. Additive Manufacturing (AM) by binder jetting is a promising alternative for obtaining porous media with properties similar to those of natural rocks. This study hypothesized that obtaining a permeability tailoring of triaxial ceramic porous media is possible by planning their internal filling configurations and subsequent fabrication by AM. Therefore, an algorithm was developed that allowed obtaining and manipulating geometric, dimensional, and spatial positions of obstacles inside the porous medium to make them promote or restrict the flow. After the sintering process, the results showed the method's applicability to obtaining porous ceramic media with different permeabilities. It was possible to get permeability changes by alternating the degree of packing of the internal structures. For the parameters tested, values between 7.73 ± 1.5 mD and 75.71 ± 0.90 mD were found, which are values similar to those commonly found in rocks from petroleum and gas reservoirs.