Modelling temperature effects on multiphase flow through porous media

Garth Wells (1) , Tim Hooijkaas (2) , Xuming Shan (3)

1 Department of Engineering [Cambridge]
2 Shell International Exploration and Production
3 Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences [Delft]

We consider strong temperature effects on two-phase immiscible flow through a porous medium. A dependency on temperature is introduced via a temperature-dependent viscosity for one of the phases. The purpose is to develop a simple prototype model for simulating the injection of steam into a porous medium which is saturated with highly viscous oil. To solve the problem, a Galerkin finite element model is formulated, with special residual-based terms added to stabilise the problem when advective transport processes dominate and to capture the discontinuities that develop at oil-water interfaces. It is also discussed how the mathematical representation of the numerical model can be transformed into computer code automatically, and two test cases are presented which demonstrate that this simplified model can capture typically observed phenomena robustly.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

Garth Wells, Tim Hooijkaas, Xuming Shan. Modelling temperature effects on multiphase flow through porous media. Philosophical Magazine, 2009, 88 (28-29), pp.3265-3279. ⟨10.1080/14786430802566364⟩. ⟨hal-00513991⟩