Investigation of Failure Mode and Permeability Evolution of Inclined Heterolithic Strata Using Coupled Discrete Element Method-Computational Fluid Dynamics Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: The presence of inclined heterolithic stratification (IHS) poses significant challenges in operational efficiency for in-situ recovery of oil sands as low-permeability IHS will hinder the vertical propagation of steam chamber. The potential shear failure and slip along IHS may lead to severe instability issues for pit slopes. Coupled Discrete Element Method (DEM)-Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model is constructed to match the flow and geomechanical response of reconstituted IHS specimen and extended to investigate the mechanical behavior, permeability evolution, and failure mode of IHS specimens considering the variation of mud content (0-100%). A novel permeability equation based on porosity variation and crack numbers is established to quantify the permeability change due to macroscopic deformation and failure from a microscopic perspective. This study establishes a quantitative relationship between the geological characteristics and coupled flow-geomechanical behavior of IHS, which is crucial for operational optimization and safe management of in-situ recovery and open-pit mining of oil sands. The developed model is also a useful instrument enabling quantification of mechanical constitutive behavior and permeability evolutions for rock and soil with interbedded weak beddings. 1. INTRODUCTION The subsurface heterogeneities formed during geological deposition and diagenesis is outstanding challenges in accurate and reliable geotechnical assessment and have attracted increasing attention in subsurface energy geotechnics (Fang & Harrison, 2002; Iferobia & Ahmad, 2020). Weak beddings are the most common types of lithological heterogeneity, which could be traces of fractures or sedimentary structures during the sedimentary processes. As a special form of weak beddings, the existence of IHS in the McMurray Formation of Alberta oil sands leads to pronounced declines in operational efficiency for in-situ recovery of oil sands since it hinders the vertical development of steam chamber (Martinius et al., 2017). A comprehensive investigation of the failure modes and permeability evolution of IHS under stress changes becomes imperative for enhancing recovery efficiency while ensuring the caprock integrity in the in-situ recovery of oil sands. This study aims to investigate the mechanical behavior, permeability evolution, and failure mode of IHS under stress and strain changes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".