Parallel simulation of wormhole propagation with the Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer framework

The acid treatment of carbonate reservoirs is a widely practiced oil and gas well stimulation technique. The injected acid dissolves the material near the wellbore and creates flow channels that establish a good connectivity between the reservoir and the well. Such flow channels are called wormholes. Different from the traditional simulation technology relying on Darcy framework, the new Darcy-Brinkman-Forchhei mer (DBF) framework is introduced to simulate the wormhole forming procedure. The DBF framework considers both large and small porosity conditions and should output better simulation results than the Darcy framework. To process the huge quantity of cells in the simulation grid and shorten the long simulation time of the traditional serial code, a parallel code with FORTRAN 90 and MPI was developed. The experimenting field approach to set coefficients in the model equations was also introduced. Moreover, a procedure to fill in the coefficient matrix in the linear system in the solver was described. After this, 2D dissolution experiments were carried out. In the experiments, different configurations of wormholes and a series of properties simulated by both frameworks were compared. We conclude that the numerical results of the DBF framework are more like wormholes and more stable than the Darcy framework, which is a demonstration of the advantages of the DBF framework. Finally, the scalability of the parallel code was evaluated, and we conclude that superlinear scalability can be achieved. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.