Multicomponent polymer flooding in two dimensional oil reservoir simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-resolution finite volume numerical scheme for simulating multicomponent polymer flooding in two-dimensional oil reservoirs, effectively handling complex flux discontinuities and heterogeneity.

Contribution

It develops a novel high-order scheme using discontinuous flux approach and slope limiters to accurately model multicomponent polymer flooding in heterogeneous reservoirs.

Findings

Scheme effectively handles non-monotone flux functions.

Accurate simulation in highly heterogeneous media.

Demonstrates importance of multiple polymers in enhanced recovery.

Abstract

We propose a high resolution finite volume scheme for a (m+1)x(m+1) system of non strictly hyperbolic conservation laws which models multicomponent polymer flooding in enhanced oil-recovery process in two dimensions. In the presence of gravity the flux functions need not be monotone and hence the exact Riemann problem is complicated and computationally expensive. To overcome this difficulty, we use the idea of discontinuous flux to reduce the coupled system into uncoupled system of scalar conservation laws with discontinuous coefficients. High order accurate scheme is constructed by introducing slope limiter in space variable and a strong stability preserving Runge-Kutta scheme in the time variable. The performance of the numerical scheme is presented in various situations by choosing a heavily heterogeneous hard rock type medium. Also the significance of dissolving multiple polymers in aqueous phase is presented