Patent ID: 6826520
Filing Date: 2004-11-30
Classification: E21B,G01N,G01V

Abstract:
A method of scaling up permeabilities associated with a fine-scale grid of cells representative of a porous medium to permeabilities associated with an unstructured coarse-scale grid of cells representative of the porous medium, comprising the steps of:(a) generating an areally unstructured, Voronoi, computational grid using the coarse-scale grid as the genesis of the computational grid, the cells of the computational grid being smaller than the cells of the coarse-scale grid and each cell of said computational grid and said coarse-scale grid having a node; (b) populating the computational grid with permeabilities associated with the fine-scale grid; (c) developing flow equations for the computational grid, solving the flow equations, and computing inter-node fluxes and pressure gradients for the computational grid; (d) using the fluxes and pressure gradients computed in step (c) to calculate inter-node average fluxes and average pressure gradients associated with the coarse-scale grid; and (e) calculating upscaled permeabilities associated with the coarse-scale grid using the average fluxes and average pressure gradients calculated in step (d).