A Scalable Thermal Reservoir Simulator for Giant Models on Parallel Computers
This paper introduces the model, numerical methods, algorithms and parallel implementation of a thermal reservoir simulator that designed for numerical simulations of thermal reservoir with multiple components in three dimensional domain using distributed-memory parallel computers. The full model is introduced with correlations for important properties and well modeling. Various well constraints, such as fixed bottom hole pressure, fix oil, water, gas and liquid rates, constant heat transfer model, convective heat transfer model, heater model (temperature control, rate control, dual rate/temperature control, and subcool (steam trap), are introduced in detail, including their mathematical models and methods. Efficient numerical methods and parallel computing technologies are presented. Numerical experiments show that our results match commercial simulators, which confirms the correctness of our methods and implementations. Scalability testings demonstrate that our simulator can handle giant thermal models with billions of grid blocks and the simulator has excellent scalability.
READ FULL TEXT