where is the water saturation measured as a fraction, is the capillary pressure (in pascal), is the permeability (measured in m²), is the porosity (0-1), is the surface tension (in N/m) and is the contact angle. The function is important in that it is constant for a given saturation within a reservoir, thus relating reservoir properties for neighboring beds.
The Leverett J-function is an attempt at extrapolating capillary pressure data for a given rock to rocks that are similar but with differing permeability, porosity and wetting properties. It assumes that the porous rock can be modelled as a bundle of non-connecting capillary tubes, where the factor is a characteristic length of the capillaries' radii.
This function is also widely used in modeling two-phase flow of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells.[2] A large degree of hydration is needed for good proton conductivity while large liquid water saturation in pores of catalyst layer or diffusion media will impede gas transport in the cathode.
J-function in analyzing capillary pressure data is analogous with TEM-function[3][4] in analyzing relative permeability data.
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M.C. Leverett (1941). "Capillary behaviour in porous solids". Transactions of the AIME (142): 159–172.
^J. M. LaManna, J. V. Bothe Jr., F. Y. Zhang, and M. M. Mench, J. Power Sources271, 180 (2014).
^Mirzaei-Paiaman, Abouzar; Saboorian-Jooybari, Hadi; Chen, Zhangxin; Ostadhassan, Mehdi (2019). "New technique of True Effective Mobility (TEM-Function) in dynamic rock typing: Reduction of uncertainties in relative permeability data for reservoir simulation". Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering. 179: 210–227. doi:10.1016/j.petrol.2019.04.044. S2CID149962022.