A Novel Upscaling Method for the In-Situ Conversion Process

Abstract

Summary The simulation of the in-situ conversion process (ICP) is a challenging endeavor that involves complicated thermal-reactive-compositional coupling processes. The upscaling of ICP simulation has been investigated, but the developed methods have significant limitations, which hinder their use in complicated models. The most constraining limitation of previous ICP upscaling techniques is that they all require modifications of the simulation code, which make them difficult to use in closed-source commercial simulators. In this paper, we introduce a novel upscaling method for ICP simulation. In this new method, we introduce two correction factors (namely α and β in this paper) to adjust the coarse-scale reaction frequency factor and activation energy. The calculation of the two factors is based on the reactions on both coarse-scale and fine-scale models. The new upscaling method does not entail any additional modifications of the underlying simulation source code, and thus it is more feasible to implement. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our upscaling method with 2D and 3D models, respectively. Apart from model dimensions, the availability of the novel upscaling method for ICP simulations with different values of kinetic parameters is considered as well. It is shown that the novel upscaling method provides reasonably accurate results, and significant computational savings are also achieved.