Upscaling Hydraulic Conductivities in Cross-Bedded Formations

Modern geostatistical techniques allow the generation of high-resolution heterogeneous models of hydraulic conductivity containing millions to billions of cells. Selective upscaling is a numerical approach for the change of scale of fine-scale hydraulic conductivity models into coarser scale models that are suitable for numerical simulations of groundwater flow and mass transport. Selective upscaling uses an elastic gridding technique to selectively determine the geometry of the coarse grid by an iterative procedure. The geometry of the coarse grid is built so that the variances of flow velocities within the coarse blocks are minimum. Selective upscaling is able to handle complex geological formations and flow patterns, and provides full hydraulic conductivity tensor for each block. Selective upscaling is applied to a cross-bedded formation in which the fine-scale hydraulic conductivities are full tensors with principal directions not parallel to the statistical anisotropy of their spatial distribution. Mass transport results from three coarse-scale models constructed by different upscaling techniques are compared to the fine-scale results for different flow conditions. Selective upscaling provides coarse grids in which mass transport simulation is in good agreement with the fine-scale simulations, and consistently superior to simulations on traditional regular (equal-sized) grids or elastic grids built without accounting for flow velocities.