Numerical Simulation of Polymer Flooding with MRST

Abstract

In this talk, main topic will be the development of a fully-implicit polymer flooding simulator within MATLAB Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST). We will introduce the background of the reservoir simulation, water-flooding and why we need to use polymer to change the flooding fluid property. Physical equations are presented to describe the polymer flooding process. Then we introduces the key features of MRST, such as its modular design, vectorized implementation, support for general unstructured grids, and automatic differentiation framework, which makes it a very powerful prototyping and experimentation platform for development of new flow models for reservoir simulation. Certain implementation details are discussed and verification against commercial simulators are provided. Application of the simulator to different scenarios is presented. And finally, we will introduce briefly the open-source development activities in Computational Geosciences group in SINTEF Digital.

Biography

Kai Bao is a Research Scientist in the Department of Mathematics & Cybernetics at SINTEF, Oslo, Norway. Before he joined SINTEF in March 2014, he worked for over 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. He holds a BE degree in thermal engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University and a PhD degree in computer applied technology from Institute of Software, Chinese Academy Sciences. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE).

Kai’s research interests include reservoir simulation, parallel computing, chemical enhanced oil recovery, computational fluid dynamics and physically based fluid animation. He has published papers through journals and conferences on above fields. He is actively involved in the development of the open-source reservoir simulators, Open Porous Media (OPM, http://opm-project.org/) and MATLAB Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST, http://www.sintef.no/projectweb/mrst/).