Advanced Gridding Methods of Fractured Reservoirs for Multiphase Flow Simulations

Hussein Mustapha

Schlumberger Abingdon Technology Center United Kingdom

Monday 17th November 2014

11:30:00

Aula Saleri VI Piano Dipartimento di Matematica Politecnico

Petroleum reservoirs, aquifers, and other geological features are often highly heterogeneous and generally include preferential flow paths resulting from the existence of natural fracture networks. Simulating the fluid flow in these features can provide valuable information for forecasting and reservoir production optimization. Discrete fracture models have recently been recognized as an important vehicle for flow simulations in fractured media, providing a powerful tool for fractured reservoir characterization. To employ such discrete fracture modeling, the geological feature is generally discretized, forming a mesh or grid to enable simulation of the fracture network. However, the geometry of the fracture network within the fractured media is often complex, and standard Delaunay-based techniques of grid generation may not be practical. In real problems, there is a significant uncertainty in fracture location, orientation, size, and aperture distributions, and good quality mesh is very suitable to explore many scenarios of discrete fracture networks as it is observed that lower quality grids impact the accuracy of the flow results and significantly lead to increased run time and simulator stability issues. In this seminar, a series of improved systems and methods will be discussed for generating a boundary-conforming quality mesh of a computation domain defined by several constraining spatially heterogeneous discrete fractures.