A dual-porosity reservoir model with a nonlinear coupling term

Conference · Tue Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 1992

OSTI ID:6286341

Zimmerman, R W; Chen, G; Hadgu, T; Bodvarsson, G S

Since their introduction by Barenblatt et al. (1960), double-porosity models have been widely used for simulating flow in fractured reservoirs, such as geothermal reservoirs. In a dual-porosity system, the matrix blocks provide most of the storage of the reservoir, whereas the fractures provide the global transmissivity. Initially, most work on dual-porosity models emphasized the development of analytical solutions to idealized reservoir problems. Increasingly, the dual-porosity approach is being implemented by numerical reservoir simulators. Accurate numerical simulation of a dual-porosity problem often requires a prohibitively large number of computational cells in order to resolve the transient pressure gradients in the matrix blocks. We discuss a new dual-porosity model that utilizes a nonlinear differential equation to approximate the fracture/matrix interactions, When implemented into a numerical simulator, it eliminates the need to discretize the matrix blocks, and thereby allows more efficient simulation of reservoir problems.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE; USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC03-76SF00098
• OSTI ID: 6286341
• Report Number(s): LBL-33090; CONF-9209337-1; ON: DE93010454
• Resource Relation: Conference: International conference on fluid flow in porous media, Moscow (Russian Federation), 22-25 Sep 1992
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
GEOLOGIC FRACTURES
FLUID FLOW
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
FLOW RATE
GEOTHERMAL SYSTEMS
POROSITY
RESERVOIR ROCK
EQUATIONS
GEOLOGIC STRUCTURES
Geothermal Legacy
150200* - Geology & Hydrology of Geothermal Systems
990200 - Mathematics & Computers