Development of an Efficient Fully Coupled Geomechanics and Fluids Flow Simulator
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Many practical problems in the petroleum industry require an understanding of fluid flows in reservoirs as well as of reservoir displacements and stresses. Conventional reservoir simulations do not take into account the stress behaviors and may lead to inaccurate predictions for stress sensitive reservoirs. To accurately predict the performance and improve management for stress sensitive reservoirs, a coupled geomechanics and fluid flow simulation is maybe required. During the last two decades, many researchers have investigated coupled issues, including coupling formulations, coupling approaches, coupling models and numerical methods. A challenging issue in this area is to achieve numerical accuracy and computational efficiency. This project aimed to build an accurate and efficient simulator for coupled geomechanics and fluid flow systems.The interactions between solid mechanical behaviors and fluid flows are complex; thus, several mathematical models are required to accurately simulate this process. In this work, we included two essential features in coupled modeling, a solid geomechanical model and a fluid flow model. In this simulator, the accuracy was achieved through a fully coupled model (FCM), and the efficiency was achieved through a finite difference (FD) discretization and simplified data structures. A staggered grid was used for numerical stability and boundary condition implementation. Furthermore, special attention was paid to solver efficiency. We investigated several Krylov subspace methods and preconditioners supplied by PETSc (the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computation, which was developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, 2003) and implemented solver parallelization. Numerical results showed that the BiCGSTAB method (Sleijpen & Fokkema 1993) combined with the ILU(0) preconditioner was an excellent choice for solving our coupled systems. Solver parallelization achieved high speedups, and good numerical stability was also shown. This finite difference simulator supplies an efficient framework for coupled geomechanics and fluid flow simulations and the flexible design allows future development for advanced features.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2003 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Shu, Tao |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Gerritsen, Margot |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Petroleum Engineering |
Subjects
| Subject | School of Earth Energy & Environmental Sciences |
|---|---|
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Shu, Tao. (2003). Development of an Efficient Fully Coupled Geomechanics and Fluids Flow Simulator. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/qr228xg8005
Collection
Master's Theses, Doerr School of Sustainability
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