Cold heavy oil production with sand (CHOPS) technique has successfully improved oil recovery from heavy oil reservoirs due to high permeability channels resulted from sand failure and foamy oil flow enhancing heavy oil movability. However, impacts of the sand failure and the foamy oil flow on multiphase fluid flow features are still not properly understood. In this paper, an effective and systematic framework has been proposed to characterize the multiphase fluid flow and determine the three-phase relative permeability of CHOPS processes. A recently developed sand failure criterion and a relative permeability model have been integrated with a reservoir simulator to simulate the CHOPS process. The unknown parameters involved in the systematic framework are intelligently determined by an iterative ensemble smoother (IES) algorithm, which also enables sensitivity analysis on CHOPS production profiles. Subsequently, the proposed framework is tested through a laboratory CHOPS experiment. We obtained not only fairly history-matched production data (i.e., cumulative oil, gas, and sand production), but also satisfactorily converged three-phase relative permeability curves by iteratively assimilating production profiles of the CHOPS experiment. It has also been found that using two sets of three-phase relative permeability is capable of representing the segment-type nature of the multiphase flow and reproducing the transition stage on the production profiles. Furthermore, the comparison between two sets of three-phase relative permeability indicates that the sand failure phenomenon yields a reduced residual oil saturation and an increased oil/gas relative permeability. In addition, the sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the segment-type nature of production profiles results from the variation of key impact factors dominating the multiphase fluid flow in CHOPS processes. Overall, the proposed systematic framework can not only reproduce the physical phenomena of sand failure and foamy oil, but also provide a convenient tool to characterize the multiphase flow in CHOPS processes.

砂冷重油（CHOPS）技术成功地改善了稠油储层的采收率，这归因于砂土破裂和泡沫油流动导致的高渗透性通道，从而提高了稠油的可移动性。但是，仍然没有正确理解沙粒破裂和泡沫油流动对多相流体流动特征的影响。本文提出了一个有效且系统的框架来表征多相流体流动并确定CHOPS过程的三相相对渗透率。最近开发的砂破坏准则和相对渗透率模型已经与油藏模拟器集成在一起，以模拟CHOPS过程。系统框架中涉及的未知参数由迭代集成平滑器（IES）算法智能地确定，它还可以对CHOPS生产资料进行敏感性分析。随后，通过实验室CHOPS实验对提出的框架进行了测试。通过迭代吸收CHOPS实验的生产剖面图，我们不仅获得了相当历史匹配的生产数据（即，石油，天然气和砂子的累计产量），而且还令人满意地收敛了三相相对渗透率曲线。还已经发现，使用两组三相相对渗透率能够表示多相流的段型性质，并且能够在生产曲线上再现过渡阶段。此外，两组三相相对渗透率之间的比较表明，砂土破坏现象会降低残余油饱和度，并提高油气相对渗透率。此外，敏感性分析表明，生产剖面的分段类型性质是由在CHOPS工艺中主导多相流体流动的关键影响因素的变化引起的。总体而言，所提出的系统框架不仅可以再现沙土破坏和泡沫油的物理现象，而且可以为表征CHOPS过程中的多相流动提供方便的工具。