Well-Posedness of a fully coupled thermo-chemo-poroelastic system with applications to petroleum rock mechanics

Abstract

We consider a system of fully coupled parabolic and elliptic equations constituting the general model of chemical thermo-poroelasticity for a fluid-saturated porous media. The main result of this paper is the developed well-posedness theory for the corresponding initial-boundary problem arising from petroleum rock mechanics applications. Using the proposed pseudo-decoupling method, we establish, subject to some natural assumptions imposed on matrices of diffusion coefficients, the existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence on initial and boundary data of a weak solution to the problem. Numerical experiments confirm the applicability of the obtained well-posedness results for thermo-chemo-poroelastic models with real-data parameters.

Keywords

• Parabolic-elliptic system
• poroelasticity
• thermo-poroelasticity
• thermo-chemo-poroelasticity
• existence
• uniqueness
• well-posedness