In petroleum engineering

Petroleum engineering

Petroleum engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the activities related to the production of hydrocarbons, which can be either crude oil or natural gas. Subsurface activities are deemed to fall within the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry, which are the activities of...

, a minipermeameter is a gas

Gas

Gas is one of the three classical states of matter . Near absolute zero, a substance exists as a solid. As heat is added to this substance it melts into a liquid at its melting point , boils into a gas at its boiling point, and if heated high enough would enter a plasma state in which the electrons...

-based device for measuring permeability in porous

Porosity

Porosity or void fraction is a measure of the void spaces in a material, and is a fraction of the volume of voids over the total volume, between 0–1, or as a percentage between 0–100%...

 rocks.

Minipermeametry has been used in the oil industry since the late 1960s (Eijpe and Weber, 1971) without becoming in any way a standard experimental method in core analysis or reservoir characterisation. The laboratory minipermeametry can make important contributions both as an improved methodology within experimental petrophysics and as a source of data invaluable in routine reservoir characterisation (C. HALVORSEN AND A. HURST, 1990)

The values obtained from the minipermeameter should possibly be calibrated by a Klinkenberg correction

Klinkenberg correction

Under steady state and laminar flow condition, Klinkenberg demonstrated that the permeability to gases is approximately a linear function of the reciprocal pressure....