Escoamento em canal parcialmente poroso e fraturado

Abstract

The transport phenomena related to porous media have aroused interest in several areas of engineering. Particularly in oil and gas reservoirs, the flows happen with constant interaction with a porous formation, that could be fractured. Fractures act as hydraulic conductors, forming regions with preferential flow. The existence of these drivers may favor the hydraulic fluid flow from the reservoir to both the drill string as the column for the formation. The fluid flow of the column to the formation may occur through the loss of drilling fluid through the fractures. This loss of fluid is undesirable because it is an expensive process and increases the cycle time of the drilling fluid. This study aims to develop a mathematical and numerical model to flow in partially porous and fractured media inside a channel. The channel consists of a ring cavity limited internally by the outer surface of the production column and externally by the fractured porous media. The solution of the equations that model the problem (mass and momentum) for both a fluid (Navier-Stokes), and for the porous medium (Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer) is solved numerically by a CFD program (computational fluid dynamics), through the Method Finite Volume. The geometric (aspect ratio, pressure through the fracture, relative thickness, number of fractures and the relative distance between fractures) and hydraulic parameters (Reynolds number, Darcy number and porosity) influence in the flow behavior is investigated for a partially and fractured channel, with focus in the velocity profiles, stream lines and the flow that leaves the channel through fractures.