SPH simulation of oil displacement in cavity-fracture structures

Application of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to Flow Simulations in Oil Reservoir Rocks

“…18 For vertically oriented fractures connecting with a circular cavity, water was seen to flow in the form of plug flow displacing the oil with an efficiency of oil recovery close to 100% when the wall is water-wet. For horizontal fractures, water was seen to rapidly sink down the cavity with the water-oil interface gradually rising until reaching the height of the connecting fractures.…”

“…10,17 In SPH applications of multiphase flow in a porous medium, the nonlinearities of these equations at the fluid-fluid interfaces are modeled using the Young-Laplace boundary condition for pressure and velocity, while at the fluid-fluid-solid interfaces the Young formula is used to prescribe the contact angle at the contact line. [18][19][20] For chemically reacting fluid phases, terms accounting for the interfacial transfer rate of mass I α and momentum α M must be added as sources on the right-side of Equations (1) and (2), respectively. 7 On the other hand, if heat transfer effects are important, Equations (1) and (2) must be complemented with a transport equation for the internal energy or enthalpy.…”

Application of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to Flow Simulations in Oil Reservoir Rocks

“…If the wall is wetted by fluid a early SPH simulations using this approach employed a Lennard-Jones force to define F αβ in Equation (7), while the nonwetting behavior was simulated defining / ij F C x αβ = − where C is a coefficient characterizing the non-wetting intensity of the fluid. 18 However, a drawback of this scheme is that for both types of forces the wetting and non-wetting intensities are specified by coefficients that must be defined to produce the desired behaviors. In other words, they act as free parameters that must be set arbitrarily.…”

“…The other approach is based on the assumption that these forces are pair wise molecular-like forces. [18][19][20] In this approach the force the field particle i belongs to phase a is defined as…”

Theoretical analysis on the applicability of traditional SPH method

“…The SPH approach even has been extended to the so-called smoothed dissipative particle dynamics (SDPD) [25] for mesoscopic problems, where thermal fluctuations are incorporated in a physically consistent way. Besides, based on the physical origins of surface tension, surface tension of immiscible fluids has been successfully reproduced in SPH simulations simply by introducing attractive forces among all particles [26,27] or suitable repulsive forces only between particles of different phases [5,28,29]. These complicated phenomena all indicate certain isomorphism between SPH and the underlying physical particles on the micro-scale, and thus the simple form of SPH formulations is far beyond a mathematical description of the macroscopic flow.…”