Comparison between a Finite-Volume Mesh and a Connectivity List-Based Discretization for High Resolution Discrete Fracture Representations.

@inproceedings{P401_Vitel,
 abstract = { Construction of fractured reservoir models for flow simulation requires the development of accurate
and efficient methods, able to handle numerous fractures and very complex 3D geometries while
informing a flow simulator. Currently, two main approaches have been developed. The first one uses
a pipe network to efficiently describe the fracture network, but is limited to model flow only within
fractures, and therefore will not properly handle a few connected fracture networks, and matrix with
non-negligible permeability. The second approach builds a fully unstructured mesh integrating the
fractures, which accurately discretizes the whole fractured medium, but requires advanced griding
techniques that are computationally demanding. Alternative approaches have thus been proposed in
the literature, in order to improve the performance of the discretization. Among them, a hybrid
technique uses a pipe network to jointly discretize discrete fracture network and a corner-point grid
representing the matrix [Vitel, 2006]. Thus, flow can occur both in fractures and matrix, while
the flexibility and efficiency of the pipe network allow to model large 3D complex reservoirs with
thousands of fractures, in only a few minutes on a regular workstation. However, for efficiency
purpose, this technique introduces a few approximations in the way matrix-fracture connections are
created.
This article presents a comparison between the finite-volume discretization technique proposed
by Karimi-Fard et al. [2004] and the hybrid pipe network method proposed by Vitel [2006]. Since
the first method is free from the pipe network approximations, this comparison allows to assess their
impact on the flow simulation results. Different scenarii of flow simulations have been run, and all
results show very good agreement between both models, while the mesh construction greatly gains
from using the pipe network. },
 author = { Vitel, Sarah AND Gong, B. AND Karimi-Fard, Mohammad AND Caumon, Guillaume },
 booktitle = { Proc. 27th Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { Comparison between a Finite-Volume Mesh and a Connectivity List-Based Discretization for High Resolution Discrete Fracture Representations. },
 year = { 2007 }
}