Modeling of physical dispersion using script environment in Petrel

Abstract

This paper concerns a practical solution of the problem resulted from the modeling of physical dispersion phenomenon occurring during fluid mixing in porous media. This is a continuation of the author's previous works, in which calculations have been performed with the use of a modified "open code" reservoir simulator (BOAST). As a part of the previous work, the developed method of controlling the fluids mixing has been implemented directly in the simulator code, while the current paper includes the implementation of this method in the Petrel script environment allowing direct access to simulation results performed on the standard Eclipse reservoir simulator. The paper contains a brief description of the script environment applied, a short description of the method of controlling the numerical dispersion and a description of the structure of the constructed script. The method of controlling the physical dispersion proposed in the paper is based on iterative calling of a standard reservoir simulator, exporting the obtained simulation results and performing calculations using to modify the obtained reservoir fluids saturation. Calculated saturations in a given step of the script iteration constitute the input data to the next step performed in the script. The proposed method was tested on a simplified one-dimensional simulation model, which assumed constant petrophysical parameters and stationary pressures. The results of the developed script are presented in the form of drawings showing various values of smearing of the zone of mixing of two reservoir fluids (water and crude oil). These results showed the effectiveness of the applied method of minimization of the numerical dispersion (through grid refinement and calculation of fluid mobility through multipoint upstream weighting in the direction of inflow) and the effects of using explicit parameters to control the physical dispersion.