Characterization of Tracer Transport in Heterogeneous Fractured Reservoir by a Streamline Approach on Unstructured Grids

Abstract

This article presents a numerical analysis on anomalous transport behavior in a heterogeneous fractured porous reservoir using streamlines. The authors developed a streamline simulator with a direct quadrilateral mesh generator to investigate the correlated effects of hydrological properties. Quadrilateral grids were made by constructing boundary loops automatically. The mesh generator showed reliable shapes and did not need to construct another control volume for a conventional transport model. Solute was transported using a streamline approach on the irregular grids with various values of permeabilities between matrix and fracture. Breakthrough curve has a skewed characteristic similar at a real heterogeneous medium. The trajectories of streamline, the distribution of pressure, and the skewed breakthrough confirm the applicability of our model at both porous and fractured medium.

Keywords:

• anomalous transport
• automatic meshing
• fractured medium
• quadrilateral grids
• streamline

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Korea Ministry of Science and Technology under the National Research Laboratory, contract M1010400042-01J000001700.