1887

Abstract

Summary

Understanding the flow inside fractures is critical for a wide range of petroleum and ground water applications. Fractured reservoir rocks have a rough, undulated rough surface with its aperture continuously undergoing change in the dimensions throughout its length. The behavior of reservoir fluids is governed by Cubic law of fluid flow inside the fractures under the increasing overburden stress. Although many investigators have analysed the fluid flow through fractures and its deviations from cubic law in detail, few have provided a definite image of modelling both rough surfaces and the associated roughness factor with it. Multiphase flow in fractures is not well understood till date and the complexity of interplay between flow, roughness and variable apertures complicates the problem further. Our work involves determination of fracture aperture, under the impact of overburden stresses and the modelling of multiphase flow in such fractures under the condition of laminar flow. Work performed here claims an approximate reduction of 0.005 cm in fracture aperture with a 1000 psi increase in overburden pressure. In this work, a numerical model is built using mathematical tools and equations that are used to compute the fluid flow through the reservoir matrix and fracture at different overburden pressures.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201701486
2017-06-12
2024-03-28
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Snow, D. T.
    , Anisotropic Permeability of Fractured Media; Water Resources Research, 5(6), 1273–1289, 1969.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Wilson, C. R.
    , An Investigation of Laminar Flow in Fractured Porous Rocks; Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1970.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Tao, Q. C.A
    , Modelling Variation of stress and Permeability in Naturally Fractured Reservoirs Using Displacement Discontinuity Method, ARMA 09–047
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Tsang, Y. W. and Tsang, C. F.
    , Hydrological Characterization of VAF; Rock joints, Barton& Stephanson (eds), Balkena, Rotterdam, 1990.
    [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201701486
Loading
/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201701486
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error