Upscaling Multiphase Flow in Porous Media

Upscaling Multiphase Flow in Porous Media
Author: D.B. Das
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005-06-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781402035135

This book provides concise, up-to-date and easy-to-follow information on certain aspects of an ever important research area: multiphase flow in porous media. This flow type is of great significance in many petroleum and environmental engineering problems, such as in secondary and tertiary oil recovery, subsurface remediation and CO2 sequestration. This book contains a collection of selected papers (all refereed) from a number of well-known experts on multiphase flow. The papers describe both recent and state-of-the-art modeling and experimental techniques for study of multiphase flow phenomena in porous media. Specifically, the book analyses three advanced topics: upscaling, pore-scale modeling, and dynamic effects in multiphase flow in porous media. This will be an invaluable reference for the development of new theories and computer-based modeling techniques for solving realistic multiphase flow problems. Part of this book has already been published in a journal. Audience This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and consultants working in the area of flow in porous media.

Modeling Flow Regimes in Porous Media

Modeling Flow Regimes in Porous Media
Author: Rasoul Arabjamaloei
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

In this research, single phase flow regimes in porous media were studied both numerically and experimentally to determine methods to predict the effects of rarefied gas flow and inertial flow. The results of this research were initially compared with the convention methods of treating rarefied gas flow, the Klinkenberg equation and inertial flow, the Forchheimer equation. In the first section of the research, the slip condition for rarefied gas flow in low permeability, two-dimensional simple porous media was studied by the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and new corrections to the Klinkenberg model and higher order slip models were investigated. To apply LBM, new corrections were introduced to the solid-fluid boundary condition and a new relationship was proposed to relate LBM viscosity and Knudsen number. To validate the LBM model, the slip flow simulation results were compared to analytical methods and experimentation. It was shown that the modified LBM simulator was capable of predicting the experimentally observed Knudsen minimum. By comparing the numerical simulation results with analytical models extracted from the up-to-date literature, the analytical model that most closely matched numerical model results was identified. In the second section of this research, the apparent permeability reduction due to inertial effects in simple and complex porous structures was studied. LBM based simulator was developed to model single-phase three-dimensional fluid flow in porous media. The simulator was verified by experimental and analytical solution tests and then was implemented to study high Reynolds number flow processes in irregular shaped porous structures. The effects of inertial on the onset and extent of non-Darcy flow in different geometries was studied. It was shown that the Forchheimer equation does not accurately fit the high Reynolds number flow. A new empirical correlation was proposed that correlates the scaled permeability and mass flow rate relationship very well and is more accurate than the Forchheimer equation. To validate the LBM, a modified experimental technique was designed and utilized to analyze permeability and mass flow rate relationships in high Reynolds number flows. The experimental results showed that the correlation in the present research is far more accurate than the Forchheimer equation.

Numerical Analysis of Multiphase Flows in Porous Media on Non-rectangular Geometry

Numerical Analysis of Multiphase Flows in Porous Media on Non-rectangular Geometry
Author: Zhen Tao
Publisher:
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

Fluid flow through porous media is a subject of common interest in many branches of engineering as well as applied natural science. In this work, we investigate the behavior and numerical treatment of multiphase flow in porous media. To be more specific, we take the sequestration of CO2 in geological media as an example. Mathematical modeling and numerical study of carbon sequestration helps to predict both short and long-term behavior of CO2 storage in geological media, which can be a benefit in many ways. This work aims at developing accurate and efficient numerical treatment for problems in porous media on non-rectangular geometries. Numerical treatment of Darcy flow and transport have been developed for many years on rectangular and simplical meshes. However, extra effort is required to extend them to general non-rectangular meshes. In this dissertation work, for flow simulation, we develop new H(div)- conforming mixed finite elements (AT and AT [superscript red] ) which are accurate on cuboidal hexahedra. We also develop the new direct serendipity finite element (DS [subscript r] ), which is H1 -conforming and accurate on quadrilaterals and a special family of hexahedra called truncated cubes. The use of the direct serendipity finite element reduces the number of degrees of freedom significantly and therefore accelerates numerical simulations. For transport, we use the newly developed direct serendipity elements in an enriched Galerkin method (EG), which is locally conservative. The entropy viscosity stabilization is applied to eliminate spurious oscillations. We test the EG-DS [subscript r] method on problems with diffusion, transport, and coupled flow and transport. Finally, we study two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media with capillary pressure. We work on a new formulation of the problem and force the continuity of the capillary flux with a modification to conquer the degeneracy. The numerical simulation of two-phase flow is conducted on non-rectangular grids and uses the new elements.

Multiphase Flow in Porous Media

Multiphase Flow in Porous Media
Author: Farad Kamyabi
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9783659615061

In the hydrocarbon reservoirs that are normally saturated with two or more fluids, in order for better description of the flowing fluids behaviors and rock-fluid interaction, the concept of relative permeability and capillary pressure should be exploited. Brilliant by Petrell AS is an object-oriented (C++) multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package developed for simulation of flow. In the continuous process of improving the system, the aim of this work is to model the multiphase flow through porous media using Darcy's equation. The models in the developed code are based on the conservation equation for each mass to obtain the pressure and saturation fields. After the code is benchmarked against the results from Eclipse for the simulation of single-phase flow, another phase is added to the porous flow part of the code to perform the simulation of multiphase flow through porous media. In this process, first the transmissibilities in the already implemented FVM code have been corrected. Then capillary pressure equations and different relative permeability models have been added to the code.

On Some Problems in the Simulation of Flow and Transport Through Porous Media

On Some Problems in the Simulation of Flow and Transport Through Porous Media
Author: Sunil George Thomas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

The dynamic solution of multiphase flow through porous media is of special interest to several fields of science and engineering, such as petroleum, geology and geophysics, bio-medical, civil and environmental, chemical engineering and many other disciplines. A natural application is the modeling of the flow of two immiscible fluids (phases) in a reservoir. Others, that are broadly based and considered in this work include the hydrodynamic dispersion (as in reactive transport) of a solute or tracer chemical through a fluid phase. Reservoir properties like permeability and porosity greatly influence the flow of these phases. Often, these vary across several orders of magnitude and can be discontinuous functions. Furthermore, they are generally not known to a desired level of accuracy or detail and special inverse problems need to be solved in order to obtain their estimates. Based on the physics dominating a given sub-region of the porous medium, numerical solutions to such flow problems may require different discretization schemes or different governing equations in adjacent regions. The need to couple solutions to such schemes gives rise to challenging domain decomposition problems. Finally, on an application level, present day environment concerns have resulted in a widespread increase in CO2 capture and storage experiments across the globe. This presents a huge modeling challenge for the future. This research work is divided into sections that aim to study various inter-connected problems that are of significance in sub-surface porous media applications. The first section studies an application of mortar (as well as nonmortar, i.e., enhanced velocity) mixed finite element methods (MMFEM and EV-MFEM) to problems in porous media flow. The mortar spaces are first used to develop a multiscale approach for parabolic problems in porous media applications. The implementation of the mortar mixed method is presented for two-phase immiscible flow and some a priori error estimates are then derived for the case of slightly compressible single-phase Darcy flow. Following this, the problem of modeling flow coupled to reactive transport is studied. Applications of such problems include modeling bio-remediation of oil spills and other subsurface hazardous wastes, angiogenesis in the transition of tumors from a dormant to a malignant state, contaminant transport in groundwater flow and acid injection around well bores to increase the permeability of the surrounding rock. Several numerical results are presented that demonstrate the efficiency of the method when compared to traditional approaches. The section following this examines (non-mortar) enhanced velocity finite element methods for solving multiphase flow coupled to species transport on non-matching multiblock grids. The results from this section indicate that this is the recommended method of choice for such problems. Next, a mortar finite element method is formulated and implemented that extends the scope of the classical mortar mixed finite element method developed by Arbogast et al (12) for elliptic problems and Girault et al (62) for coupling different numerical discretization schemes. Some significant areas of application include the coupling of pore-scale network models with the classical continuum models for steady single-phase Darcy flow as well as the coupling of different numerical methods such as discontinuous Galerkin and mixed finite element methods in different sub-domains for the case of single phase flow (21, 109). These hold promise for applications where a high level of detail and accuracy is desired in one part of the domain (often associated with very small length scales as in pore-scale network models) and a much lower level of detail at other parts of the domain (at much larger length scales). Examples include modeling of the flow around well bores or through faulted reservoirs. The next section presents a parallel stochastic approximation method (68, 76) applied to inverse modeling and gives several promising results that address the problem of uncertainty associated with the parameters governing multiphase flow partial differential equations. For example, medium properties such as absolute permeability and porosity greatly influence the flow behavior, but are rarely known to even a reasonable level of accuracy and are very often upscaled to large areas or volumes based on seismic measurements at discrete points. The results in this section show that by using a few measurements of the primary unknowns in multiphase flow such as fluid pressures and concentrations as well as well-log data, one can define an objective function of the medium properties to be determined, which is then minimized to determine the properties using (as in this case) a stochastic analog of Newton's method. The last section is devoted to a significant and current application area. It presents a parallel and efficient iteratively coupled implicit pressure, explicit concentration formulation (IMPEC) (52-54) for non-isothermal compositional flow problems. The goal is to perform predictive modeling simulations for CO2 sequestration experiments. While the sections presented in this work cover a broad range of topics they are actually tied to each other and serve to achieve the unifying, ultimate goal of developing a complete and robust reservoir simulator. The major results of this work, particularly in the application of MMFEM and EV-MFEM to multiphysics couplings of multiphase flow and transport as well as in the modeling of EOS non-isothermal compositional flow applied to CO2 sequestration, suggest that multiblock/multimodel methods applied in a robust parallel computational framework is invaluable when attempting to solve problems as described in Chapter 7. As an example, one may consider a closed loop control system for managing oil production or CO2 sequestration experiments in huge formations (the "instrumented oil field"). Most of the computationally costly activity occurs around a few wells. Thus one has to be able to seamlessly connect the above components while running many forward simulations on parallel clusters in a multiblock and multimodel setting where most domains employ an isothermal single-phase flow model except a few around well bores that employ, say, a non-isothermal compositional model. Simultaneously, cheap and efficient stochastic methods as in Chapter 8, may be used to generate history matches of well and/or sensor-measured solution data, to arrive at better estimates of the medium properties on the fly. This is obviously beyond the scope of the current work but represents the over-arching goal of this research.