Numerical Sensitivity Analysis and Simulation of Petrophysical Characteristics of Porous Media Domains
Date
2019-01-14
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Abstract
The interaction between capillary, gravity and viscous forces in porous media results in complex multi-phase fluid flow phenomena affecting pore-scale fluid occupancies during drainage and imbibition. The reconstruction and characterization of digital rock physics in such sophisticated systems is certainly non-trivial, as there is a myriad of technical constraints ranging from numerical convergence issues over fluid interfaces to limited hardware capacity and computational resources. The accurate and interactive visualization of high-resolution pore-scale data-sets is also a challenge as it requires high-end, high-powered graphics workstations. Although there are some advanced and efficient techniques proposed to simulate pore-scale fluid flow displacements, it is still a complicated task to successfully initialize a simulation case and choose the right computational domain, boundary conditions, solvers and assumptions. This work starts with single-phase simulations of electric current and fluid flow in an extensive dataset of synthetic microscale domains in order to investigate the hydraulic-electric analogy in granular porous media. The excellent practicality and reliability of pore-level computational fluid dynamic simulations are demonstrated, and two sets of models for the determination of electric and hydraulic tortuosities in unconsolidated packs of thousands of spherical grains are proposed and validated. The second thesis objective is to conduct two-phase pore-level simulations, together with a sensitivity analysis, in order to determine the range of applicability of some simplifying assumptions regarding the forces that control the physics of flow and the arrangement of fluid-fluid and fluid-solid interfaces. We show that the pore space spatial geometry and rock wettability are the primary parameters that dictate the amount of residual trapping. Lastly, a workflow is proposed to set a maximum allowable level of image upscaling for high-resolution large data sets of different rock types, thus allowing to minimize the number of computational nodes.
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Keywords
Fluid Mechanics, Simulation, Modeling, Upscaling, Up-scaling, Pore-level, Morphology, Fluid Occupancy, Tortuosity
Citation
Goudarzi, B. (2019). Numerical Sensitivity Analysis and Simulation of Petrophysical Characteristics of Porous Media Domains (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.