Numerical simulation of miscible fluid flows in porous media

Ahammad, Mohammad Jalal (2014) Numerical simulation of miscible fluid flows in porous media. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF (Migrated (PDF/A Conversion) from original format: (application/pdf)) - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (3MB) [English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. (Original Version)

Abstract

The study of miscible ow in porous media is an important topic in many disciplines of science and engineering, especially in the field of petroleum engineering. For example, Carbon dioxide (CO₂) may be injected into an oil reservoir in order to improve the oil recovery rates, which is called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This thesis focuses on the study of a miscible displacement of two fluids, such as CO₂ and oil, in a porous medium. An upscaling methodology for modeling multiscale features of the ow and the porous medium has been studied, where the overall pressure drag and skin friction exerted on the porous medium has been modelled by combining the Darcy's law with a statistical mechanical theory of viscosity, which is an important contribution of this thesis. A numerical methodology for capturing the multiphysics and multiscale nature of the governing motion has been studied. The temporal discretization employs the second order Crank-Nicolson scheme for viscous and diffusive phenomena, and an explicit method for all other terms. The nonlinear advection terms in the momentum equation has been treated with an Euler explicit flux form central finite difference method; however, the advection of the CO2 mass flux has been treated with a streamline based Lagrangian method. In order to implement the Marker-and-Cell (MAC) scheme for resolving the incompressibility, a staggered arrangement of the velocity and pressure has been presented on a collocated grid. This approach enhances the implementation of a multigrid solver, and is a novel computational model for simulating miscible displacement processes. The performance of the Lagrangian method has been assessed with respect to an equivalent flux form upwind method. The results indicate that the viscous forces play a signicant role compared to the effect of permeability on miscible displacement of CO₂ and oil, where the injected CO₂ displaces the residual oil without being distorted, thereby enhancing the recovery of hydrocarbon. Although the present results with an idealized model lacks from verifications with field measurements, findings of this thesis provide useful feedback to further investigations on CO₂ based EOR techniques.

Actions (login required)

View Item