ISSN Online: 2377-424X
ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-421-2
International Heat Transfer Conference 15
Method for Predicting Spatial Distribution of Formation Thermophysical Properties from Temperature Logs
Sinopsis
Formation thermophysical properties of steam injection wells are important parameters for evaluating thermal efficiency of thermal recovery processes. This study presents an effective inversion method for estimating the spatial distribution of formation thermophysical properties from temperature logs. The proposed method is based on a heat transfer model which coupled the wellbore and the formation heat transfer with a novel transient heat conduction function for formation heat conduction, and the steam and
wellbore temperature fields could be simulated through the heat transfer model. The heat flux, formation
thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity which affect steam temperature were regarded as uncertainty parameters for inversion. To improve the inversion speed and accuracy, sensitivity analysis was conducted to investigate the correlation between the uncertain parameters and steam temperature. Then the inversion method was applied to predict formation thermophysical properties. The various distributions of thermophysical properties which reflected the differences in physical properties of geographic regions and geological formations were obtained. It was found that although the thermophysical properties predicted by
the present method showed variability with not only well location but also well depth, the distribution values
agreed well with the field data with mean relative error below 5%. Furthermore, the estimated steam
temperatures by the spatial distributions of thermophysical properties were in better accordance with the field
data than that by the uniform results of literature value and the mean values, which demonstrated the
feasibility of the proposed method for estimating the spatial distributions of thermophysical properties.
PALABRAS CLAVE:
Thermophysical properties, Conduction, Spatial distribution, Temperature logs, Inversion method