Métodos numéricos para a solução de escoamentos bifásicos de fluidos incompressíveis em meios porosos

Abstract

Reservoir simulation is part of an important area of reservoir engineering. Reservoir simulators are based on mathematical models capable of predicting the fluid flow through porous medium. Water-oil incompressible models are represented by a system of differential partial equations in two variables: pressure and the fluid saturation. The system of equations of the problem is not simple to solve and it demands the use of iterative methods to get the approximate solution. In this work we compared a coupled implicit approach and a decoupled scheme. The decoupled system evolves in time using an implicit method to solve the pressure equation solution whereas the solution for the saturation equation is obtained using Explicit Euler and BDF (Backward Differentiation Formulas) methods. The solutions in space discretization use the Kurganov-Tadmor method and the Upwind Scheme. Upwind Scheme is a first-order finite volume based method whereas Kurganov-Tadmor (KT) is a second-order central scheme. Different kinds of reservoir types and different rock and oil properties were used to compare the results with more precise solutions in order to estimate the amount of numerical errors introduced by each method. These results allowed us to quantify the difference between the analyzed methods and to observe that the solution obtained from the decoupled method yields the best results, in particular when the BDF method is used to solve the saturation equation in time. The solution from the BDF method in association with the Upwind Scheme compared with the KT shows that, as expected, the KT method is less diffusive than the Upwind. Our work suggests that the use of the KT method in association with the BDF results in a more accurate method. On the other hand, the KT method is computationally more expensive compared to Upwind Scheme. Nevertheless, to produce numerical results with similar errors to KT, the Upwind Scheme can be more than five times slower.