A General Purpose Thermal Model

Abstract

This paper describes a fully implicit four-phase (oil, water, gas, solid fuel) numerical reservoir model for simulating hot water injection, steam injection, dry combustion, and wet combustion in one, two, or three dimensions and in either a Cartesian, radial, or curvilinear geometry. The simulator rigorously models fluid flow, heat transfer (convective and conductive), heat loss to formation, fluid vaporization/condensation, and chemical reactions. Any number of oil or gas phase components may be specified, along with any number of solid phase components (fuel and catalysts).The simulator employs either D4 Gaussian elimination or powerful incomplete factorization methods to solve the often poorly conditioned matrix problems. An implicit well model is coupled to the simulator, where reservoir unknowns and well block pressures are primary variables.This paper includes (1) comparisons of the numerical model's results with previously reported laboratory physical models' results for steam and combustion and (2) analytical solutions to a hot waterflood problem. In addition, an actual field-scale history match is presented for a single-well steam stimulation problem.

Numerical Simulation of Heavy Crude Oil Combustion in Porous Combustion Tube

“…Field-scale simulation results have been reported by Youngren (1980) and Genrich and Pope (1988) A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 4 formation and coke oxidation processes. Among the most comprehensive models reported so far include the model by Coats (1980) and Rubin and Buchanan (1985). Both the above models reported a good match with experimental data.…”

“…The development and validation of the present numerical model helps in studying the performance of ISC at a substantially lower cost than experimental investigation. Mobility weighted approach with higher order scheme for evaluating mobility term has been used to replace the conventional mobility un-weighted well flow equation (Rubin and Buchanan, 1985). Further, Quasi-Newton method with an optimum grid size has been used in the A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 5 present study.…”

Role of NAPL Thermal Properties in the Effectiveness of Hot Water Flooding

“…A variety of numerical models have been developed for simulation of nonisothermal multiphase flow and transport with interphase partitioning for environmental applications (Class et al 2002;Falta et al 1992;Pruess 1991) and for petroleum reservoir simulation (Coats et al 1974;Rubin and Buchanan 1985;Tamim et al 2000). In the current study, the compositional simulator, CompSim (McClure and Sleep 1996;O'Carroll and Sleep 2007;Sehayek et al 1999;Sleep 1998;Sleep and Sykes 1993a,b;Sleep et al 2000a,b) was used to simulate hot water flooding of viscous NAPLs.…”

An Eos-Based Numerical Simulation of Thermal Recovery Process Using Unstructured Meshes

“…Later on, Ishimoto et al (1987) presented the results of a one-dimensional and fully implicit compositional steam-flood model. Rubin and Buchanan (1985) described a general, fully implicit, four-phase, multi-component, multidimensional formulation for steam and in-situ combustion processes. This model includes a fully implicit well model and has appropriate and robust iterative techniques for solving large thermal problems.…”