Experimental and numerical investigations of particle plugging in fracture-vuggy reservoir: A case study

Fracture-vuggy reservoirs commonly occur in carbonate rock and volcanic rock, leading to a significant loss of circulation. With both vugs and fractures, a fracture-vuggy reservoir is somewhat different from a fracture reservoir in pore structure and the plugging mechanism of particle materials. Based on the visualization model of a microfluidic chip and CFD–DEM numerical simulation, a set of methods was established to evaluate the effect of particle plugging in a fracture-vuggy reservoir. First, the influence of vugs on the particle bridging mechanism in the fracture-vuggy reservoir was analyzed using CFD–DEM numerical simulation. The results showed that vugs aggravated particle retention and reduced plugging efficiency. The particle plugging of the fracture-vuggy reservoir and fracture reservoir were compared through microfluidic experiments. This study provides a new evaluation method for characterizing particle plugging near a wellbore, and provides an intuitive understanding of the plugging mechanism of a fracture-vuggy reservoir.