Statistical behaviors for renormalization of correlated permeability field

• Study of statistical behaviors for renormalization of correlated permeability field.
• Scaling for the renormalized permeability exhibits a crossover behavior.
• Larger correlation length leads to a larger convergent value for permeability.
• For log-normal distribution, scaling and convergent value fitted by formulas.

In this article, the statistical properties for the renormalized permeability obtained from the renormalization of the correlated permeability field are investigated. In contrast to the uncorrelated porous media, the scaling of the variance of the renormalized permeability field exhibits a crossover behavior. When the correlation lengths are larger compared with the domain scale covered by the renormalization procedure, the variance of the renormalized permeability will decrease slowly and the scaling exponent will be close to zero. As the renormalization number increases, the covered domain scale will eventually become larger than the correlation lengths, and then the scaling property will transit to the uncorrelated case. The convergent values of the renormalized permeability for isotropic and anisotropic correlated media are also investigated. Both the theoretical analysis and the simulation results show that larger correlation length in one direction will lead to a larger convergent value in the corresponding direction. For the log-normal permeability field, numerical simulations show that the crossover scaling and also the convergent value for the renormalized permeability can be fitted very well by simple mathematical functions.