Lecturer:Shuyu Sun, professor of King Abdullah University of Science & Technology

    Date: September 11, 2020     9:00

    Place: Zoom  ID:210 089 8623  

    Organizer: School of Mathematics and Statistics

    Warmly Welcome!

    Abstract of report: Modeling and simulation of multiphase flow in porous media have been a major effort in reservoir engineering and in subsurface environmental study, in particular they are heavily used in the management of existing petroleum fields and the development of new oil and gas reservoirs. One basic requirement for accurate modeling and simulation of multiphase flow is to have the predicted physical quantities sit within a physically meaningful range. For example, the predicated saturation should sit between 0 and 1 while the predicated molar concentration should sit between 0 and the maximum value allowed by the equation of state. Unfortunately, popular simulation methods used in petroleum industries do not preserve physical bounds. A commonly used fix to this problem is to simply apply a cut-off operator. However, this cut-off practice does not only destroy the local mass conservation but it also damages the global mass conservation, which seriously ruins the numerical accuracy and physical interpretability of the simulation results. Another major issue with common semi-implicit algorithms for two-phase flow or multi-phase flow is to resolve the discontinuity of saturation due to different capillary pressure functions in heterogeneous porous media. In this talk we present three new efficient IMplicit Pressure Explicit Saturation (IMPES) schemes for multi-phase flow in porous media with capillary pressure. Compared with the conventional IMPES schemes, the new IMPES schemes are inherently physics-preserving, namely, the new algorithm is locally mass conservative for all phases. They are able to accurately reproduce the discontinuity of saturation due to different capillary pressure functions, and they enjoy the merit that the total velocity is continuous in the normal direction. Moreover, the new schemes are unbiased with regard to the phases and the saturations of all phases are bounds-preserving if the time step size is smaller than a certain value. We also present some interesting examples to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the new algorithm. This presentation is based on the joint work [1-3] with Huangxin Chen (Xiamen University), Jisheng Kou (Shaoxing University), Xiaolin Fan (Guizhou Normal University), and Tao Zhang (KAUST).

    Prof. Shuyu Sun is currently the Director of the Computational Transport Phenomena Laboratory (CTPL) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and a Co-Director of the Center for Subsurface Imaging and Fluid Modeling consortium (CSIM) at KAUST. He is a founding faculty member jointly appointed by the program of Earth Sciences and Engineering (ErSE) and the program of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (AMCS) at KAUST since 2009. He also holds or held a number of adjunct faculty positions across the world, including Adjunct Professor in Xi’an Jiao Tong University, Adjunct Professor in China University of Petroleum at Beijing, Adjunct Professor in China University of Petroleum at Qingdao, and Adjunct Professor in China University of Geosciences at Wuhan. Before joining KAUST, Dr. Sun served as a (tenure-tracked) Assistant Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University in the United States. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in computational and applied mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin. His research includes the modeling and simulation of porous media flow at Darcy scales, pore scales and molecular scales. Dr. Sun has published 400+ articles, including 230+ refereed journal papers. He is the founding president of InterPore Saudi Chapter.