Large-Scale Computing in Reservoir Simulation

Abstract

Operator-splitting techniques are applied to the nonlinear coupled systems of partial differential equations used to model multiphase or multicomponent flows in porous media. Convection is treated by time-stepping along the characteristics of the associated pure convection problem, and diffusion is modeled via Petrov-Galerkin finite element techniques. Accurate approximations of the fluid velocities needed in the modified method of characteristic time-stepping are obtained by mixed finite element methods. Substructuring techniques are used to develop self-adaptive local grid-refinement enhance ments to the operator-splitting methods described above. Aspects of large-scale computation will be emphasized.