Ali Reza Sadeghinia - Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
Mohammad Torkaman - Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran

In the past few decades, multi-staged fracturing technologies applied to horizontal wells have significantly facilitated the development of oilfields. Nevertheless, a quantitative assessment of the complexity of the fracture network generated by hydraulic fracturing has been confronted with many difficulties. In this research, a discrete fracture model (DFM) based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was developed in a naturally fractured reservoir. In addition, hydraulic fracture aperture, hydraulic fracture numbers, and permeability on oil production rate were examined. A sensitivity analysis was conducted, and the results revealed that the oil production rate increased with increased fracture aperture and hydraulic fracture numbers. To validate the accuracy of the proposed method, a comparison between pressure distributions in a single fractured reservoir with a phase-field discrete fracture model (PFDFM) has been conducted. The proposed method for simulating fluid flow in a fractured porous medium is accurate, convergent, and very promising by numerical results

Numerical simulation, Discrete fracture model, Fractured horizontal well, Hydraulic fracture