A space-time adaptive method for flows in oil reservoirs

This work presents a space-time adaptive framework for simulating multi-phase flows through porous media, with specific applications to flows in oil reservoirs. A fully unstructured discretization of space and time is used instead of a conventional time-marching approach. For d-dimensional spatial problems, this requires the generation of (d+1)-dimensional meshes, where time is treated as an additional spatial dimension. Anisotropic mesh adaptation is performed based on a posteriori error estimation to reduce the error of a specified output of interest. This work makes use of the DWR method for error estimation and the MOESS algorithm for metric-based mesh optimization. A discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretization is used to solve on simplex meshes with arbitrary anisotropy, and thereby obtain solutions of higher order accuracy in both space and time. The adaptive framework has been applied to single-phase and two-phase flow test problems in a one-dimensional reservoir, and the results were compared to those obtained from a time-marching finite volume method that is representative of a typical industrial simulator.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Jayasinghe, Yashod Savithru

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Darmofal.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/101495

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/101495