Two-phase non-Darcy flow in heterogeneous porous media: A numerical investigation
Conférence invitée
Date
2010Résumé
Significant inertial effects are observed for many applications such as flow in the near-wellbore region, in very permeable reservoirs or in packed-bed reactors. In these cases, the classical description of two-phase flow in porous media by the generalized Darcy's law is no longer valid. Due to the lack of a formalized theoretical model confirmed experimentally, this study is based on a generalized Darcy-Forchheimer approach for modelling two-phase incompressible non-stationary inertial flow in porous media. In this model, the momentum conservation equation for each phase, , has a quadratic correction to generalized Darcy’s law and is expressed as: (=”w” for water or “o” for oil): (1) This equation is completed with the mass conservation equation for each phase given by (2) and the capillary pressure and saturation relationships (3) (4) Using a finite volume formulation, an IMPES (IMplicit for Pressures, Explicit for Saturations) scheme and a Fixed Point method for the treatment of non-linearities caused by inertia, a 3D numerical tool has been developed. For clarity, results are presented in 1D and 2D configurations only. For 1D flow in a homogeneous porous medium, a validation is performed by comparing numerical results of the saturation front kinetics with a semi-analytical solution inspired from the “Buckley-Leverett” model extended to take into account inertia. The influence of inertial effects on the saturation profiles and therefore on the breakthrough curves for homogeneous media is analysed for different Reynolds numbers, thus emphasizing the necessity of taking into account this additional energy loss when necessary. For 1D heterogeneous configurations, a thorough analysis of the saturation fronts as well as the saturation jumps at the interface between two media of contrasted properties highlights the influence of inertial effects for different Reynolds and capillary numbers. In 2D heterogeneous configurations, saturation distributions are strongly affected by inertial effects. In particular, capillary trapping of the displaced fluid observed for the Darcy regime in certain regions can completely disappears when inertial effects become dominant.
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Communication avec acteOur interest in this work is the stationary one-phase Newtonian flow in a class of homogeneous porous media at large enough flow rates requiring the introduction of the inertial forces at the pore-scale. At the macroscale, ...
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Communication avec acteLa mise en place d'un outil numérique 3D de simulation d'écoulement diphasique hors régime de Darcy basé sur le modèle de Darcy-Forchheimer généralisé est présentée. L'outil est tout d’abord validé à l’aide d'une solution ...
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Communication sans acteThis work focuses on the stationary one-phase Newtonian flow in a class of homogeneous porous media at large enough flow rates leading to a non-linear relationship between the filtration velocity and the pressure gradient. ...
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Article dans une revue avec comité de lectureIn this study, non-Darcy inertial two-phase incompressible and non-stationary flow in heterogeneous porous media is analyzed using numerical simulations. For the purpose, a 3D numerical tool was fully developed using a ...
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Communication sans acteOur interest in this work is dedicated to the dependence upon the filtration velocity (or Reynolds number) of the inertial correction to Darcy's law for one-phase flow in homogeneous porous media. The starting point of our ...