Numerical Simulation of Multi-phase Flow in Porous Media on Parallel Computers

A parallel reservoir simulator has been developed, which is designed for large-scale black oil simulations. It handles three phases, including water, oil and gas, and three components, including water, oil and gas. This simulator can calculate traditional reservoir models and naturally fractured models. Various well operations are supported, such as water flooding, gas flooding and polymer flooding. The operation constraints can be fixed bottom-hole pressure, a fixed fluid rate, and combinations of them. The simulator is based on our in-house platform, which provides grids, cell-centred data, linear solvers, preconditioners and well modeling. The simulator and the platform use MPI for communications among computation nodes. Our simulator is capable of simulating giant reservoir models with hundreds of millions of grid cells. Numerical simulations show that our simulator matches with commercial simulators and it has excellent scalability.