Effect of deformability on fluid flow through a fractured-porous medium

A permeable geologic medium containing interstitial fluids generally undergoes deformation as the fluid pressure changes. Depending on the nature of the medium, the strain ranges from infinitesimal to finite quantities. This response is the result of a coupled hydraulic-mechanical phenomenon which can basically be formulated in the generalized three-dimensional theory of consolidation. Dealing mainly with media of little deformability, traditional hydrogeology accounts for medium deformability as far as it affects the volume of pore spaces, through the introduction of a coefficient of specific storage in the fluid flow equation. This treatment can be justified on the basis of a one-dimensional effective stress law and the assumption of homogeneity of the total stress field throughout the medium. The present paper uses a numerical model called ROCMAS (Noorishad et al., 1982; Noorishad e al., 1984) which was developed to calculate fluid flow through a deformable fractured-porous medium. The code employs the Finite Element Method based on a variational approach. It has been verified against a number of simple analytic solutions. In this work, the code is used to address the role of medium deformability in continuous and pulse testing techniques. The errors that may result because of application of traditional fluid flow methods are discussed. It is found that low pressure continuous well testing or pulse testing procedures can reduce such errors. 16 references, 9 figures, 1 table