Advanced Simulation Technique for Modeling Multiphase Fluid Flow in Porous Media

Abstract

Modeling fluid flow in a porous medium is a challenging computational problem. It involves highly heterogeneous distributions of porous medium property, various fluid flow characteristics. For the design of better flow management scheme, high performance computing tools have been applied as a useful technique. In this paper, various parallel implementation approaches are introduced mainly based on high performance computing toolkits such as ADIFOR, PETSc, and Cactus. Provided by ADIFOR, accurate Jacobian matrix computation scheme was coupled with PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation), which allows data structures and routines for the scalable solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. In addition to the PETSc-ADIFOR-based approach, we also present a methodology to apply a grid-enabled parallel implementation toolkit, Cactus for the simulation of fluid flow phenomena in porous media. The preliminary result shows a significant parallel performance. On the basis of the current result, we further discuss the future plan for the design of multi-purpose porous media flow simulator.