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Slickwater hydraulic fracturing is becoming a prevalent approach to economically recovering shale hydrocarbon. It is very important to understand the proppant’s transport behavior during slickwater hydraulic fracturing treatment for effective creation of a desired propped fracture geometry. The currently available models are either oversimplified or have been performed at limited length scales to avoid high computational requirements. Another limitation is that the currently available hydraulic fracturing simulators are developed using only single-sized proppant particles. Motivated by this, in this work, a computationally efficient, three-dimensional, multiphase particle-in-cell (MP-PIC) model was employed to simulate the multi-size proppant transport in a field-scale geometry using the Eulerian–Lagrangian framework. Instead of tracking each particle, groups of particles (called parcels) are tracked, which allows one to simulate the proppant transport in field-scale geometries at an affordable computational cost. Then, we found from our sensitivity study that pumping schedules significantly affect propped fracture surface area and average fracture conductivity, thereby influencing shale gas production. Motivated by these results, we propose an optimization framework using the MP-PIC model to design the multi-size proppant pumping schedule that maximizes shale gas production from unconventional reservoirs for given fracturing resources.
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Data-Driven Model Reduction for Coupled Flow and Geomechanics Based on DMD Methods
Learning reservoir flow dynamics is of primary importance in creating robust predictive models for reservoir management including hydraulic fracturing processes. Physics-based models are to a certain extent exact, but they entail heavy computational infrastructure for simulating a wide variety of parameters and production scenarios. Reduced-order models offer computational advantages without compromising solution accuracy, especially if they can assimilate large volumes of production data without having to reconstruct the original model (data-driven models). Dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) entails the extraction of relevant spatial structure (modes) based on data (snapshots) that can be used to predict the behavior of reservoir fluid flow in porous media. In this paper, we will further enhance the application of the DMD, by introducing sparse DMD and local DMD. The former is particularly useful when there is a limited number of sparse measurements as in the case of reservoir simulation, and the latter can improve the accuracy of developed DMD models when the process dynamics show a moving boundary behavior like hydraulic fracturing. For demonstration purposes, we first show the methodology applied to (flow only) single- and two-phase reservoir models using the SPE10 benchmark. Both online and offline processes will be used for evaluation. We observe that we only require a few DMD modes, which are determined by the sparse DMD structure, to capture the behavior of the reservoir models. Then, we applied the local DMDc for creating a proxy for application in a hydraulic fracturing process. We also assessed the trade-offs between problem size and computational time for each reservoir model. The novelty of our method is the application of sparse DMD and local DMDc, which is a data-driven technique for fast and accurate simulations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1804407
- PAR ID:
- 10188669
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Fluids
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2311-5521
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 138
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids4030138
