Research on Numerical Simulations of Heavy Oil Thermal Recovery by Steam Injection

The works on the developments of the numerical scheme for multi-phase flows in porous media and the adaptive mesh refinement in numerical simulations of heavy oil thermal recovery by steam injection are introduced. First, a finite analytic method was developed to deal with a challenging problem in numerical simulations in the case of strong geological heterogeneity, which cause the upscaling permeability to have a rapid change cross the grid interfaces and therefore the nodal flow effects will lead the flow fingering to the high permeability region. With the traditional numerical scheme, refining the coarse grid enough is the only manner to describe the flow pattern accurately. Second, for the incompressible two-phase flows, a numerical scheme, which could avoid the grid orientation effects efficiently, was proposed. Next, the adaptive mesh refinement technique was applied to the numerical simulations for the processes of thermal recovery by steam injection, where the different heterogeneous cases of the reservoir were considered, like the reservoir with the permeability variations, the different rock-types, the fractured porous media, the complex faulted reservoir or complex boundary reservoirs. The proposed AMR technique is fast and can give good accuracy. At last, on the basis of above theoretical research, a software package for the reservoir simulations, where the AMR technique was included, was developed.