AVALIAÇÃO DE TÉCNICAS DE ACOPLAMENTO HIDROMECÂNICO

Resumo

Conventional flow simulators simplify important aspects of the mechanical behavior of
rocks that can significantly impact the productivity and integrity of the oil fields. It is important to
consider the influence of the variation of effective stresses on the properties of the reservoir, such as
porosity and permeability, especially for fractured and stress-sensitive reservoirs. Numerical models
that consider the deformation of the porous medium due to the production or injection of fluids can
solve the flow problem (pressure and saturation) and the mechanical problem (displacement field) in a
single system of equations or in separate systems. This work aims to compare coupling schemes (fully
coupled, fixed stress split and the two-way partial coupling) for cases available in literature. For the
fully coupled and fixed stress split methods, the flow and mechanical problems were solved through
the in-house simulator CodeBright, while for the two-way partial coupling, the flow problem was
solved through the commercial flow simulator Imex, while the mechanical problem was solved
through a finite element program in Matlab, and simulators were integrated in an automated way by a
manager code in Matlab. The two-way partial coupling and fixed stress split methods proved to be a
good approximation for the fully coupled method. One of the advantages offered by the two-way
partial coupling method is that the mechanical calculations were performed in only a few steps of
coupling time, reducing the computational effort and making this method very competitive for the
solution of hydromechanical problems of practical interest.