A first approach to an integrated Gocad workflow for reservoir geomechanics.

Rafael A. C. Albuquerque and Sergio A. B. Fontoura da and Arthur M. B. Braga and Nelson Inoue and Carlos E. R. Lautenschlger and Guilherme L. Righetto and Austavo B. Meurer. ( 2014 )
in: Proc. 34th Gocad Meeting, Nancy

Abstract

The increasing complexity of reservoirs requires a complete evaluation of the main effects which influence on production and the environment. This work presents the first version of a practical workflow to perform reliable hydro-mechanical coupled simulations. This workflow is a Gocad extension which enables the generation of finite element meshes based on a preexisting finitedifference grid, the management of coupled analysis execution, and it also enables post-process results by loading of flow, stress and displacement data in the Gocad environment for evaluation. Geomechanical effects can be very relevant during reservoirs analyses. Actually, there are many possibilities available to consider such effects, but iterative coupled analysis has shown to be one of the best solutions because it presents accurate results in a feasible computational timeframe. ATHENA/GTEP/PUC-Rio in partnership with CENPES/ PETROBRAS have been developing this methodology for 3 years in order to enhance the studies on reservoir geomechanics. This research group has developed a coupling program which manages both the flow simulator (IMEX or Eclipse) and the finite element solver (Abaqus or a faster in-house GPU solution called Chronos) in an interactive way. The mentioned program provides a wide-ranging solution for reservoir geomechanics. However, mesh generation, data preparation and results evaluations are bottlenecks for its application in the company’s work routine. The Gocad workflow presented in this work eases these time consuming tasks and offers a quite intuitive user interface for reservoir geomechanics studies.

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BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{AlbuquerqueGM2014,
 abstract = { The increasing complexity of reservoirs requires a complete evaluation of the main effects which influence on production and the environment. This work presents the first version of a practical workflow to perform reliable hydro-mechanical coupled simulations. This workflow is a Gocad extension which enables the generation of finite element meshes based on a preexisting finitedifference grid, the management of coupled analysis execution, and it also enables post-process results by loading of flow, stress and displacement data in the Gocad environment for evaluation.
Geomechanical effects can be very relevant during reservoirs analyses. Actually, there are many possibilities available to consider such effects, but iterative coupled analysis has shown to be one of the best solutions because it presents accurate results in a feasible computational timeframe. ATHENA/GTEP/PUC-Rio in partnership with CENPES/ PETROBRAS have been developing this methodology for 3 years in order to enhance the studies on reservoir geomechanics. This research group has developed a coupling program which manages both the flow simulator (IMEX or Eclipse) and the finite element solver (Abaqus or a faster in-house GPU solution called Chronos) in an interactive way. The mentioned program provides a wide-ranging solution for reservoir geomechanics. However, mesh generation, data preparation and results evaluations are bottlenecks for its application in the company’s work routine. The Gocad workflow presented in this work eases these time consuming tasks and offers a quite intuitive user interface for reservoir geomechanics studies. },
 author = { Albuquerque, Rafael A. C. AND Fontoura da, Sergio A. B. AND Braga, Arthur M. B. AND Inoue, Nelson AND Lautenschlger, Carlos E. R. AND Righetto, Guilherme L. AND Meurer, Austavo B. },
 booktitle = { Proc. 34th Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { A first approach to an integrated Gocad workflow for reservoir geomechanics. },
 year = { 2014 }
}