Numerical Investigations of the Effect of Nonlinear Quadratic Pressure Gradient Term on a Moving Boundary Problem of Radial Flow in Low-Permeable Reservoirs with Threshold Pressure Gradient

The existence of a TPG can generate a relatively high pressure gradient in the process of fluid flow in porous media in low-permeable reservoirs, and neglecting the QPGTs in the governing equations, by assuming a small pressure gradient for such a problem, can cause a significant error in predicting the formation pressure. Based on these concerns, in consideration of the QPGT, a moving boundary model of radial flow in low-permeable reservoirs with the TPG for the case of a constant flow rate at the inner boundary is constructed. Due to strong nonlinearity of the mathematical model, a numerical method is presented: the system of partial differential equations for the moving boundary problem is first transformed equivalently into a closed system of partial differential equations with fixed boundary conditions by a spatial coordinate transformation method; and then a stable, fully implicit finite difference method is used to obtain its numerical solution. Numerical result analysis shows that the mathematical models of radial flow in low-permeable reservoirs with TPG must take the QPGT into account in their governing equations, which is more important than those of Darcy’s flow; the sensitive effects of the QPGT for the radial flow model do not change with an increase of the dimensionless TPG.