Nestor Alirio Rivera Vega's thesis
by
Nestor Alirio Rivera Vega, M.S.E.
University of Texas at Austin, 1995
Supervisor: Larry Lake
One important problem in the description of a heterogeneous porous medium is
upscaling permeability at a fine-grid system to equivalent permeability defined
at a coarse-grid system, such as a simulation block. To investigate this
particular topic, stochastic, lognormally distributed, permeability fields,
were generated for a large variety of directional ranges of spatial correlation,
and coefficients of variation of permeability. The model used was a two dimensional
cross section reservoir with 900 cells. A steady-state simulator was run for the
different realizations, and the effective permeability was calculated.
The results showed that the effective permeability is a function of effective aspect
ratio, variance of permeability, and range of spatial correlation. The effective
permeability in the flow direction increases with aspect ratio and the range of
spatial correlation in the flow direction, but decreases with the range of spatial
correlation perpendicular to the flow direction.
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