ABSTRACT:

Flow characteristics of fracture networks are of great interest in applications in reservoir engineering. Assessing these characteristics requires in general significant efforts in conducting finite element analysis and then adapting the results by means of upscaling techniques to the entire reservoir. The use of commercial or other proprietary software for modeling these characteristics has been widely reported in the literature. While well developed, researchers might find the difficulty of access to the software or to the source codes. We aimed to address these difficulties by proposing a simple solution for modeling fluid flow through fractures in two and three-dimensional DFN models implemented in an open source package, built on a new hybrid mesh-pipe model. It is demonstrated that the proposed method is accurate and efficient. The application of our proposed method for the directional permeability analysis of DFN models is also discussed.

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