Xiang Rao, Xupeng He, Hyung Kwak, Ali Yousef, Hussein Hoteit

A novel streamline simulation method for fractured reservoirs with full-tensor permeability

  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes
  • Mechanics of Materials
  • Computational Mechanics
  • Mechanical Engineering
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In this work, we develop a novel streamline (SL) simulation method that integrates seamlessly within the embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM). The novel SL-based method is developed based on a hybrid of two-point flux approximation (TPFA) and mimetic finite difference (MFD) methods, which is applicable to a two-phase anisotropic flow in fractured reservoirs. We refer to this novel approach as EDFM-TPFA-MFD-SL. The approach is operated in an IMplicit Pressure Explicit Saturation (IMPES) manner. First, this work establishes a novel EDFM utilizing a hybrid TPFA-MFD scheme to solve the pressure equation for phase flux approximation. Subsequently, we introduce a practical streamline tracing workflow designed to derive the distribution of streamlines within the reservoir domain and the time-of-flight distribution along each individual streamline. This feature allows for the parallel computation of water saturation along the streamlines. Two numerical examples are presented to validate the superiority of the proposed EDFM-TPFA-MFD-SL method compared to the existing streamline-based EDFM on cases with full-tensor permeability. The results show that the proposed method could significantly mitigate the numerical dissipation and reduce the computation costs. Another numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in dealing with complex fracture networks and providing rapid flow diagnostics, indicating its significant potential for real-world field applications.

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