화학공학소재연구정보센터
Transport in Porous Media, Vol.84, No.3, 773-798, 2010
Fully Coupled THMC Modeling of Wellbore Stability with Thermal and Solute Convection Considered
Wellbore stability analysis is an important topic in petroleum geomechanics. Analytical and numerical analysis of wellbore stability involves the study of interactions among pressure, temperature and chemical changes, and the mechanical response of the rock, a coupled thermal-hydraulic-mechanical-chemical (THMC) process. Thermal and solute convection have usually been overlooked in numerical models. This is appropriate for shales with extremely low permeability, but for shales with intermediate and high permeability (e.g., shale with a disseminated microfissure network), thermal and solute convection should be considered. The challenge of considering advection lies in the numerical oscillation encountered when implementing the traditional Galerkin finite element approach for transient advection-diffusion problems. In this article, we present a fully coupled THMC model to analyze the stress, pressure, temperature, and solute concentration changes around a wellbore. In order to overcome spurious spatial temperature oscillations in the convection-dominated thermal advection-diffusion problem, we place the transient problem into an advection- diffusion-reaction problem framework, which is then efficiently addressed by a stabilized finite element approach, the subgrid scale/gradient subgrid scale method (SGS/GSGS).