Hydromechanical embedded finite element for conductive and impermeable strong discontinuities in porous media

Published in Computers and Geotechnics, Vol. 172, 106427, 2024
DOI: 10.1016/j.compgeo.2024.106427

Abstract

The pore pressure inside oil and gas reservoirs compartmentalized by sealing faults increases during injection processes. The rise in the pore pressure can induce fault reactivation, leading to hydraulic issues such as fluid leakage from the reservoir to other layers and seismicity. Therefore, it is essential to accurately model the mechanisms involved in this problem, primarily related to the presence of a strong discontinuity, a fault, inside the domain. Several numerical approaches can be used to represent the presence of discontinuities. The embedded finite element method (EFEM) has recently gained attention because it does not require the mesh to conform with the discontinuities, thus circumventing the typical mesh generation challenges of modeling faulted domains. The current EFEM formulations cannot properly model a hydromechanical problem such as fault reactivation, due to simplifications in their derivation. Hence, this work proposes a new fully coupled hydromechanical EFEM formulation based on the Strong Discontinuity Approach that can represent discontinuities acting as preferential flow paths or barriers for the fluid flow. The formulation is applied to a fault reactivation problem, showing the main reactivation mechanisms. This paper also discusses the presence of spurious oscillations along the discontinuities and their relations with the mesh discretization.