Dynamic modelling of overprinted impermeable fault gouges and surrounding damage zones as lower dimensional interfaces

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2021.104719. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Authors

Thomas Poulet, Martin Lesueur, Ulrich Kelka

Abstract

In the modelling of subsurface fluid flow, faults are dominant features since they can act as fluid pathways or barriers. Special emphasis is therefore placed in representing them in a numerically efficient manner and the use of lower dimensional domains has become prevalent to simulate higher permeability features like fractures. Such features, however, only represent some of the components of natural fault networks, which can also include rather impermeable fault gouges surrounded by higher permeability damage zones for instance. Here we present a numerical approach to simulate such systems at a large scale, where the thickness of those features makes it advantageous to represent them as discrete rather than continuous domains, using lower dimensional interfaces in a conforming mesh. Benchmarks show excellent agreement with equivalent continuous simulations, regardless of the fault thickness or permeability, both for flow conduits and barriers. This approach can also account for the overprinting of faults with different permeabilities, as well as their dynamic evolution, which we illustrate with an example of trap charging. This work demonstrates the applicability of the approach to simulate fluid flow in faulted environments of various permeabilities and we discuss how those results can easily be extended to account for multi-physical processes.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/osf.io/4gpsf

Subjects

Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Petroleum Engineering

Keywords

dynamic mixed permeability, fault overprinting, flow in fractured porous media, lower dimensional interface

Dates

Published: 2019-11-15 03:18

Last Updated: 2023-08-30 23:52

Older Versions
License

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1