Speaker
Description
The simulation of single- and multiphase flow in fractured porous media has been the topic of ongoing research for decades with wide-ranging applications in the geosciences and beyond. Among the approaches previously suggested, embedded discrete fracture models (EDFM) and projection-EDFM (or pEDFM) distinguish themselves by providing accurate results that explicitly include matrix-fracture interactions while not requiring the matrix mesh to refine near or conform to the discrete fracture network. While the original EDFM and pEDFM approaches were designed for structured meshes alone, recent advancements in this field aim to expand these approaches to more flexible environments. For example, unstructured computational meshes are often used in the simulation of flow in porous media; however, EDFM and pEDFM methods have not been developed for these mesh types beyond tetrahedral-based schemes. Here, we present a method for implementing EDFM and pEDFM in fully-unstructured computational meshes with polyhedron of arbitrary order. The calculations of intersection area and the so-called connectivity index (CI) employ Monte-Carlo sampling rather than purely geometric techniques, making this approach agnostic to the mesh configuration and maximizing computational efficiency. We apply this method to a study of CO2 storage in a fractured reservoir to both verify the model behavior and showcase the utility of the new method. Our results indicate that the model can indeed simulate the expected results: CO2 storage in fractured reservoirs tends to enhance dissolution and residual trapping of CO2 throughout the reservoir while eliminating density driven fingering near fractures.
| Country | Netherlands |
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