Multiphase flow simulation with gravity effect in anisotropic porous media using multipoint flux approximation

Abstract Numerical investigations of two-phase flows in anisotropic porous media have been conducted. In the flow model, the permeability has been considered as a full tensor and is implemented in the numerical scheme using the multipoint flux approximation within the framework of finite difference method. In addition, the experimenting pressure field approach is used to obtain the solution of the pressure field, which makes the matrix of coefficient of the global system easily constructed. A number of numerical experiments on the flow of two-phase system in two-dimensional porous medium domain are presented. In this work, the gravity is included in the model to capture the possible buoyancy-driven effects due to density differences between the two phases. Different anisotropy scenarios have been considered. From the numerical results, interesting patterns of the flow, pressure, and saturation fields emerge, which are significantly influenced by the anisotropy of the absolute permeability field. It is found that the two-phase system moves along the principal direction of anisotropy. Furthermore, the effects of anisotropy orientation on the flow rates and the cross flow index are also discussed in the paper.

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