Permeability upscaling with OPM

Upscaling

Note: this page is outdated, the program upscale_perm should be used instead of upscale_singlephase. Usage and parameters is different!

The upscale_singlephase program requires some parameters to choose what model to run, boundary condition types etc. While they can be specified on the command line, is is more convenient to put them in a file. Write the following three lines to a file, and call it upscale.param. (Note that it is important to have no extra spaces around the “=” signs.)

fileformat=eclipse
filename=Hummocky.grdecl
boundary_condition_type=0

Then you run the case by entering the command:

upscale_singlephase upscale.param

That produces quite a bit of output (parameters used, some numerical diagnostics), but the important part is at the bottom:

Upscaled K in millidarcy:
146.257140761845 0 0 
0 149.445786241513 0 
0 0 10.0629512956922

The permeability is output as a full tensor, and you can see that the Z-direction permeability is significantly lower than the X- and Y-directions, which is not surprising given that the model has many layers.