IMPROVED PROCESS FOR PREDICTING BEHAVIOR OF A SUBTERRANEAN FORMATION

摘要

A process is disclosed for predicting a characteristic of a fluid-containing physical system such as a reservoir. The physical system is discretized to a plurality of gridcells. For each gridcell, nonlinear governing equations are constructed that are representative of fluid properties for each fluid. The nonlinear terms are linearized to derive linear equations at a current timestep. The linear equations are then solved to determine estimates of the solution. The estimated solution is then improved by a gridcell-by-gridcell computation wherein flows into and out of a particular gridcell are determined using linearized values of nonlinear terms in gridcells adjacent that particular gridcell. The improved solution is used to predict a property of a fluid in the physical system at end of the timestep. These calculation steps are repeated for a plurality of timesteps and the results are used to predict a property of the physical system and the fluids it contains as a function of time.