Parallel simulation of two-phase incompressible and immiscible flows in porous media using a finite volume formulation and a modified IMPES approach

In this paper a finite volume method with a "Modified Implicit Pressure, Explicit Saturation" (MIMPES) approach is used to model the 3-D incompressible and immiscible two-phase flow of water and oil in heterogeneous and anisotropic porous media. A vertex centered finite volume method with an edge-based data structure is adopted to discretize both the elliptic pressure and the hyperbolic saturation equations using parallel computers with distributed memory. Due to the explicit solution of the saturation equation in the IMPES method, severe time step restrictions are imposed on the simulation. In order to circumvent this problem, an edge-based implementation of the MIMPES method was used. In this method, the pressure equation is solved and the velocity field is computed much less frequently than the saturation field. Following the work of Hurtado, a mean relative variation of the velocity field throughout the simulation is used to automatically control the updating process, allowing for much larger time-steps in a very simple way. In order to run large scale problems, we have developed a parallel implementation using clusters of PC's. The simulator uses open source parallel libraries like FMDB, ParMetis and PETSc. Results of speed-up and efficiency are presented to validate the performance of the parallel simulator.