Hydraulic flow unit is a rock typing method representing a very important tool to construct a quick petrophysical model of the

reservoir and predict the reservoir rock properties .

Hydraulic Flow Units (HFU)

Building a model
Considering the reservoir to be composed of a bundle of capillary tubes, we can derive an HFU model by coupling of Darcy and Poiseuille equations and introducing the irreducible water saturation in the boundary conditions, as following

Building a model
Poiseuille

Darcy

Building a model
By equating the previous equations and solving for Ac we can get a relationship between permeability and porosity as following:

Building a model
A generalized form of kozeny-Carmen equation will be: Defines HFU model

The final form

RQI

FZI

Data analysis
Assuming a reservoir is cored for a given number of core plugs, this reservoir is assumed to have a number of imaginary layers which equal to the core number (each core represents one layer), each layer has its own porosity, permeability, capillary pressure and mineralogy .

Data analysis
For these cores we can measure porosity and permeability and draw the capillary pressure profile. Then we can plot the reservoir quality index against the normalized porosity on log-log scale for values obtained from each core. As in fig (1).

5 Unit s
Figure (1)

Data analysis
we can define the number of flow units. Then, depending on the flow zone indicators we should make a back calculation for a selected cluster to verify the HFU prediction.

Prediction for uncored wells