PORE-SCALE SIMULATION OF MULTIPHASE FLOW CONSIDERING THERMO-HYDRO-MECHANICAL COUPLING EFFECT IN POROUS MEDIA

Researches on the thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) coupling effect in porous media from the perspective of pore-scale is of great significance for the study of enhanced oil recovery, nuclear storage, and geological sequestration of CO ₂. In order to study the migration of oil resources in porous media in the deep oil reservoir, we used a combined method to realize the THM process occurring in porous media. The Darcy-Brinkman-Biot method was applied to simulate the THM process and the calculation of thermal stress was achieved by adding the Duhamel-Neumann thermoelastic stress to the model. A water-oil two-phase flow process considering THM coupling effect in porous media was then realized. The model has simulated flow of multiphase fluid in the pore space by solving the Navier-Stokes equations and calculated flow of the fluid in the rock matrix by solving the Darcy equation. The two processes were coupled with a series of momentum exchange equations to obtain the displacement of solid particles, thus realizing the fluid-solid coupling effect. On this basis, a heat transfer model was added to numerical model to consider the influence of temperature field on the two-phase flow process. Temperature field acts on the matrix in the form of thermoelastic stress to realize the THM coupling process. Based on the model, we simulated the flow process of water-oil two-phase fluid in a two-dimensional porous media model. The results have shown that: (1) the direction of thermal stress was opposite to that generated by fluid-structure coupling effect, which made the total stress smaller than that under the fluid-structure coupling effect; (2) the porosity of the model increased with the increase of temperature, however, when the injection temperature difference reached 150 K, the porosity no longer increased significantly; (3) with the increase of temperature, the relative permeability of the water phase increased and the equal-permeability point shifted to the left.