Adaptation of cell resolution near wells in unstructured meshes for flow simulations

Capucine Legentil and Margaux Raguenel and David Lopez and Wan-Chiu Li and Cédric Borgese and Gilles Darche. ( 2023 )
in: 2023 {RING} meeting, pages 16, ASGA

Abstract

Multiphase flow simulations are key to understand the behavior of fluids in the subsurface, as well for natural hydrocarbon resources production as for CO2 storage applications. One of the major components of these simulations is the representation of wells in the 3D models. To ensure a better precision of the phenomena occurring near wells, a finer geometrical representation is required. In the classical simulation chain with structured meshes, this requires the use of LGR (Local Grid Refinement) with a loss of mesh conformity, or the use of smaller elements in all the model, which leads to huge computation costs. To overcome this problematic, unstructured meshes can be used, preserving mesh conformity with specific configurations to handle wells: resolution maps and geometrical patterns for vertical and horizontal wells. These specific configurations are here applied on different models using different mesh types: PEBI (PErpendicular-BIsector) and hex-dominant meshes. The obtained meshes are presented and compared, as well as the impact on flow simulation results.

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BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{legentil_adaptation_RM2023,
 abstract = {Multiphase flow simulations are key to understand the behavior of fluids in the subsurface, as well for natural hydrocarbon resources production as for CO2 storage applications. One of the major components of these simulations is the representation of wells in the 3D models. To ensure a better precision of the phenomena occurring near wells, a finer geometrical representation is required. In the classical simulation chain with structured meshes, this requires the use of LGR (Local Grid Refinement) with a loss of mesh conformity, or the use of smaller elements in all the model, which leads to huge computation costs. To overcome this problematic, unstructured meshes can be used, preserving mesh conformity with specific configurations to handle wells: resolution maps and geometrical patterns for vertical and horizontal wells. These specific configurations are here applied on different models using different mesh types: PEBI (PErpendicular-BIsector) and hex-dominant meshes. The obtained meshes are presented and compared, as well as the impact on flow simulation results.},
 author = {Legentil, Capucine and Raguenel, Margaux and Lopez, David and Li, Wan-Chiu and Borgese, Cédric and Darche, Gilles},
 booktitle = {2023 {RING} meeting},
 language = {en},
 pages = {16},
 publisher = {ASGA},
 title = {Adaptation of cell resolution near wells in unstructured meshes for flow simulations},
 year = {2023}
}