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Coupling an Industrial Reservoir Simulator and a Geomechanical Software Using Unstructured Grids, Poromechanical Element
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, 80th EAGE Conference and Exhibition 2018, Jun 2018, Volume 2018, p.1 - 5
Abstract
Significant work has been done for generating unstructured grids for reservoir simulations. Coupled geomechanics simulation and hydraulic fracture flow for gas shale simulation have given a new impulse for unstructured gridding. The objective of this paper is to improve the coupling of flow and geomechanics using unstructured grid models, by demonstrating the ability to apply a more efficient pressure coupling using discretization at vertices on both sides (mechanical and flow equations).
We adopt the traditional approach where the flow and mechanical systems are solved separately and coupled through iterations. This strategy is motivated from the availability of robust commercial software for the flow equations as well as for the mechanical equations.
The novelty of the paper is to propose an iterative coupling scheme with full pressure coupling at vertices. The geomechanics equations fully coupled to a single phase flow are solved using global pressure. Since most geo-mechanic simulators propose poro-mechanical elements allowing a fully coupled single phase flow problem, the main advantage of this method is the ability to use a full pressure coupling method with industrial simulators with a much improved convergence. Application of the methodology is presented on a synthetic faulted black-oil reservoir simulation model.