Development of a New Parallel Polymer Flooding Simulator for Conventional and Naturally Fractured Reservoirs

Abstract This paper deals with the development of our parallel reservoir simulator that is designed for giant reservoir models. It considers oil, water and polymer, and a reservoir can be a conventional reservoir without fractures or a naturally fractured reservoir. For polymer flooding, the simulator can model polymer retention, adsorption, an aqueous phase permeability reduction and viscosity increase, and an inaccessible pore volume. Here fractures are modeled by the dual porosity and dual permeability method. The finite difference (volume) method is applied to discretize the model, upstream techniques are employed to deal with rock-fluid properties, and the fully implicit method in time is applied. The linear systems from the Newton method are ill-conditioned and a scalable CPR-type preconditioner is employed to accelerate the solution of these linear systems. The computed results are compared with those from commercial simulators, and they match very well. The scalability of the simulator is good.