复杂边界稠油油藏蒸汽注采过程自适应网格法的研究

将自适应网格法推广到复杂边界稠油油藏的蒸汽注采过程,针对复杂边界附近的网格提出相应的粗化算法。首先,在实施自适应网格算法之前对边界上最精细网格上的计算参数进行预处理以提高计算精度,然后,再利用同样的预处理方法对自适应网格法中边界处的各层次粗网格的渗透率进行粗化。在建立动态AMR网格系统的网格粗化准则中,仅采用油藏温度和各相饱和度的空间变化作为控制阈值,这样边界区域在相变锋面未到达时将自适应地采用粗网格进行计算。数值算例显示边界附近自适应地采用粗网格进行计算并不影响油藏数值模拟的计算精度,自适应网格法在保持计算精度的同时,大幅度提高了计算速度。     

含泥质夹层油藏蒸汽注采过程的自适应网格算法研究

根据泥质夹层的低渗特性及空间分布，本文提出了一种含泥质夹层油藏网格渗透率的粗化计算方法，并在此基础上，将自适应网格算法应用于含泥质夹层油藏的数值模拟，提升其计算效率．在计算过程中，网格的动态划分仅依据流体物理量的变化，泥质夹层区域不全部采用细网格，仅针对流动锋面处的泥质夹层采用细网格，其余泥质夹层处采用不同程度的粗网格．相较于传统算法，网格数大幅下降．数值算例表明，自适应网格算法的计算结果精度与全精细网格一致，能够准确模拟出泥质夹层对于流体的阻碍作用，同时计算效率得到大幅提升，约为全精细网格算法的3~7 倍．     

弹塑性变形油藏中多相渗流的数值模拟

基于流固耦合力学理论,建立了弹性变形油藏中多相渗流的数学模型,该模型考虑了渗流与变形的耦合作用,以及注采交变载荷作下油藏多孔介质的弹性变形特征,给出了耦合数值模拟方法和算例。     

油藏数值模拟发展现状

油藏数值模拟是以多相流体在多孔介质中流动的理论为基础,目前已广泛应用于油藏工程.本文就流体流动方程、数值计算方法、软件的开发和应用等方面,阐述了所谓黑油模型发展现状,同时介绍了组分模型和热采模型等其他类型模型.还就国内如何开展油藏模拟工作提出了建议.      

Modeling Chemotactic Waves in Saturated Porous Media using Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Bacterial transport is heavily influenced by chemical gradients and interfaces that exist in the subsurface. The main aim of this article is to describe a method of simulating the propagation of a traveling bacterial wave in a contaminated region and the resulting degradation of the contaminant. The presence of the chemotactic term and the relatively small bacterial diffusion means that the wave contains a very sharp wavefront. We, therefore, use an upwind conservative numerical scheme to obtain accurate and numerically stable solutions. The accuracy of the method is verified by comparisons with an exact one-dimensional solution of a simplified problem to give the same wavespeed. The method is then used to simulate the propagation of a realistic chemotactic wave in one dimension. We then use adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to compute the propagation of chemotactic waves in two dimensions using the simplified model calibrated to give the same wavespeed as the full model.     

Pore-Scale Level Set Simulations of Capillary-Controlled Displacement with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Transport in Porous Media - Multiphase flow simulations on imaged porous rock structures require numerical methods that are accurate and robust when applied on complex geometries. A key element in...     

Pore-Level Investigation of Heavy Oil Recovery During Water Alternating Solvent Injection Process

This study concerns with the microscopic and macroscopic fluid distribution and flow behavior during water alternating solvent (WAS) injection process to heavy oil using micromodel generated from thin section of a real rock which has rarely attended in the available literature. In this study, a one-quarter five-spot glass micromodel was deployed to examine the effect of flow media topology on microscopic displacements as well as macroscopic efficiency of WAS process. The micromodel was initially saturated with the heavy oil, and then the hydrocarbon solvent and water were injected alternately into it. The observations confirmed that WAS injection scheme is an effective method for the recovery of the significant amount of residual oil. Using solvent as the leading batch in WAS scheme can really improve the oil recovery by increasing the amount of microscopic sweep efficiency in flow paths, where the molecular diffusion in solvent–heavy oil system occurs. Presence of connate water in WAS scheme can improve the recovery efficiency especially at higher water saturations. Heterogeneity of the medium caused the water to be distributed better in the medium, but the amount of residual oil in the flow area is going to be increased. Small precipitates of asphaltene particles due to solvent injection and localized entrapment of the oil due to heterogeneity effects, water blockage, and deadend pores were observed mainly in this process. The results of this study reveals the pore scale events in WAS injection process and will be helpful for developing reliable simulation models.     

Recovery of Light Oil by Medium Temperature Oxidation

We study one aspect of combustion in porous media for the recovery of light oil. We assume that there is a temperature range above low temperature combustion where oxygen is added to the aliphatic oils to form oxygenated compounds and below the temperature where cracking and coke formation occurs. In the intermediate range oil is combusted to form small combustion products like water, CO $_2$ , or CO. We call this medium temperature oxidation (MTO). Our simplified model considers light oil recovery when it is displaced by air at medium pressures in linear geometry, for the case when water is absent. The resulting MTO combustion displaces all the oil. There are adjacent vaporization and combustion zones, traveling with the same speed. The MTO reaction is assumed to be slow, so that vaporization is much faster. The solution of the model equations leads to a thermal wave upstream, a MTO wave in the middle and a cold isothermal Buckley–Leverett gas displacement process downstream. One of the unexpected results is that vaporization occurs upstream of the combustion zone. In the initial period the recovery curve is typical of gas displacement, but after a critical amount of air has been injected the cumulative oil recovery increases linearly until all oil has been recovered. In our model, the oil recovery is independent of reaction rate parameters, but the recovery is much faster than for gas displacement. Finally, the recovery is slower for higher boiling point and higher oil viscosity, but faster at higher injection pressure. We give a simple engineering procedure to compute recovery curves for a variety of different conditions.     

Hydrodynamic and Thermal Fields in a Porous Medium with Injection of Superheated Steam

The plane one-dimensional and radially symmetric problems of injection of superheated steam into a porous medium saturated with gas are considered. Self-similar solutions are constructed on the assumption that in this case four zones are formed in the porous medium, namely, a gas flow zone, superheated and wet steam zones, and a water slug zone formed due to steam condensation. On the basis of the solution obtained, both the effects of the boundary pressure, mass flow rate, and temperature of the injected superheated steam and the effect of the initial state of the porous medium on the propagation of the hydrodynamic and thermal fields in the porous medium are studied.     

Microscopic Mechanisms of Oil Recovery By Near-Miscible Gas Injection

As gas flooding becomes a more viable means of enhanced oil recovery, it is important to identify and understand the pore-scale flow mechanisms, both for the development of improved gas flooding applications and for the predicting phase mobilisation under secondary and tertiary gas flooding. The purpose of this study was to visually investigate the pore-level mechanisms of oil recovery by near-miscible secondary and tertiary gas floods. High-pressure glass micromodels and model fluids representing a near-miscible fluid system were used for the flow experiments. A new pore-scale recovery mechanism was identified which significantly contributed to oil recovery through enhanced flow and cross-flow between the bypassed pores and the injected gas. This mechanism is strongly related to a very low gas/oil interfacial tension (IFT), perfect wetting conditions and simultaneous flow of gas and oil in the same pore, all of which occur as the gas/oil critical point is approached. The results of this study helps us to better understand the pore-scale mechanisms of oil recovery in very low-IFT (near-miscible) systems. In particular we show that in near-miscible gas floods, behind the main gas front, the recovery of the oil continues by cross-flow from the bypassed pores into the main flow stream and as a result almost all of the oil, which has been contacted by the gas, could be recovered. Our observations in high-pressure micromodel experiments have demonstrated that this mechanism can only occur in near-miscible processes (as opposed to immiscible and completely miscible processes), which makes oil displacement by near-miscible gas floods a very effective process.     

Oil Recovery by Low Salinity Water Injection into a Reservoir: A New Study of Tertiary Oil Recovery Mechanism

Low salinity water injections for oil recovery have shown seemingly promising results in the case of clay-bearing sandstones saturated with asphaltic crude oil. Reported data showed that low salinity water injection could provide up to 20% pore volume (PV) of additional oil recovery for core samples and up to 25% PV for reservoirs in near wellbore regions, compared with brine injection at the same Darcy velocity. The question remains as to whether this additional recovery is also attainable in reservoirs. The answer requires a thorough understanding of oil recovery mechanism of low salinity water injections. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the increased oil recovery using low salinity water, including migration of detached mixed-wet clay particles with absorbed residual oil drops, wettability alteration toward increased water-wetness, and emulsion formation. However, many later reports showed that a higher oil recovery associated with low salinity water injection at the common laboratory flow velocity was neither necessarily accompanied by migration of clay particles, nor necessarily accompanied by emulsion. Moreover, increased water-wetness has been shown to cause the reduction of oil recovery. The present study is based on both experimental and theoretical analyses. Our study reveals that the increased oil recovery is only related to the reduction of water permeability due to physical plugging of the porous network by swelling clay aggregates or migrating clay particles and crystals. At a fixed apparent flow velocity, the value of negative pressure gradient along the flow path increases as the water permeability decreases. Some oil drops and blobs can be mobilized under the increased negative pressure gradient and contribute to the additional oil recovery. Based on the revealed mechanism, we conclude that low salinity water injection cannot be superior to brine injection in any clay-bearing sandstone reservoir at the maximum permitted injection pressure. Through our study of low salinity water injection, the theory of tertiary oil recovery has been notably improved.     

Diffusive Effects on Recovery of Light Oil by Medium Temperature Oxidation

Volatile oil recovery by means of air injection is studied as a method to improve recovery from low permeable reservoirs. We consider the case in which the oil is directly combusted into small products, for which we use the term medium temperature oil combustion. The two-phase model considers evaporation, condensation and reaction with oxygen. In the absence of thermal, molecular and capillary diffusion, the relevant transport equations can be solved analytically. The solution consists of three waves, i.e., a thermal wave, a medium temperature oxidation (MTO) wave and a saturation wave separated by constant state regions. A striking feature is that evaporation occurs upstream of the combustion reaction in the MTO wave. The purpose of this paper is to show the effect of diffusion mechanisms on the MTO process. We used a finite element package (COMSOL) to obtain a numerical solution; the package uses fifth-order Lagrangian base functions, combined with a central difference scheme. This makes it possible to model situations at realistic diffusion coefficients. The qualitative behavior of the numerical solution is similar to the analytical solution. Molecular diffusion lowers the temperature of the MTO wave, but creates a small peak near the vaporization region. The effect of thermal diffusion smoothes the thermal wave and widens the MTO region. Capillary diffusion increases the temperature in the upstream part of the MTO region and decreases the efficiency of oil recovery. At increasing capillary diffusion the recovery by gas displacement gradually becomes higher, leaving less oil to be recovered by combustion. Consequently, the analytical solution with no diffusion and numerical solutions at a high capillary diffusion coefficient become different. Therefore high numerical diffusion, significant in numerical simulations especially in coarse gridded simulations, may conceal the importance of combustion in recovering oil.