EXPERIMENTS WITH VORONOI MESHES FOR GEOTHERMAL MODELS

Abstract

Various modellers have used Voronoi meshes in their geothermal models, constructed by first triangulating the region of interest and then connecting the centres of all the triangles to form a polygonal mesh. A Voronoi mesh has the nice property that the lines joining block centres are orthogonal to the block boundaries. However in some cases the Voronoi meshes used have an undesirable feature of including one or more very small sides in some blocks. In the current study we implement an algorithm for regularising Voronoi meshes, offsetting the orthogonality condition against the secondary aim of having all sides of a block being of the same size.
The method is demonstrated on a test problem of an injection/production doublet and on a mesh used in a previous modelling study.