Multi-scale high-performance fluid flow: Simulations through porous media

In petroleum production and engineering, the subsurface formation that surrounds the well screen gets, in many cases, deteriorated with time in relation to its hydraulic conductivity. As a consequence, well production declines with time and this limits to a large extent its efficiency. Since well installation is a major production operation that usually requires a large capital, it is always important to revive the use of the installed wells rather than abandoning them. One of the methods that have been proposed to alleviate this problem is to inject chemicals that dissolve, in a sense, the formation materials and open channels to ease the flow of the oil. Most of the research work that has been reported on this topic appeals to experimental correlations that are to a large extent specific to certain types of porous media (e. g., granular, consolidated porous media) and therefore not applicable to the wide range of soil material types. In this work, we provide an alternative route, thanks to the advancement in the CFD simulations of complex pore scale structures. The idea is to update the permeability based on pore scale simulations rather than based on experimental correlations. The main challenge beside coupling two different spatial scales is to handle the differences in time scales required to perform porous media simulations (which are relatively fast) versus the time required to update the permeability based on CFD simulations (which are relatively slow). This goal can be achieved through the generation of offline database data of permeability values with a direct access from a porous media simulator, which triggers the transmission whenever a new calculated value is available.