Virtual Element Method for geomechanics on reservoir grids
For researchers and engineers in reservoir simulation, this work provides practical improvements to VEM for handling complex polyhedral grids common in subsurface models.
This paper investigates the use of the Virtual Element Method (VEM) for geomechanics in reservoir simulations, addressing challenges with highly elongated cells and curved faces. It demonstrates the importance of calculating forces via traction on element boundaries and proposes a more stable regularization term for reservoir applications.
In this paper we study the use of Virtual Element method for geomechanics. Our emphasis is on applications to reservoir simulations. The physical processes that form the reservoirs, such as sedimentation, erosion and faulting, lead to complex geometrical structures. A minimal representation, with respect to the physical parameters of the system, then naturally leads to general polyhedral grids. Numerical methods which can directly handle this representation will be highly favorable, in particular in the setting of advanced work-flows. The Virtual Element method is a promising candidate to solve the linear elasticity equations on such models. In this paper, we investigate some of the limits of the VEM method when used on reservoir models. First, we demonstrate that care must be taken to make the method robust for highly elongated cells, which is common in these applications, and show the importance of calculating forces in terms of traction on the boundary of the elements for elongated distorted cells. Second, we study the effect of triangulations on the surfaces of curved faces, which also naturally occur in subsurface models. We also demonstrate how a more stable regularization term for reservoir application can be derived.