Multi-Fracture Reservoir Simulations for Long Time Physical Processes

Reservoirs with multi-fracture techniques are developed and frequently used for oil and gas industry. Recently, they are also used for deep geothermal reservoirs especially for Hot Dry Rock (HDR). The analysis of the reservoir is generally interested in long time physical properties (10–100 years), e.g. fluid flow, heat transport etc. Typical CFD simulations are limited in this context. Here we developed a fluid flow and heat transport modeling in a multi-fracture reservoir based on the so-called Mixed Dimensional Model (MDM), which describes the different characteristic flows and the heat transport in different dimensions. In the mathematical point of view, these models are discretized based on the Cellular Automaton (CA) method combined with other necessary numerical techniques. The different cases of fluid flow and heat transport in multi-fracture reservoirs have been simulated and shown physical results very reasonably with less computational time. (© 2013 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)