A joint industry-academy project for the development of integrated reservoir-wells tools
Clovis Maliska
SINMEC/CFD Lab Federal University of Santa Catarina – BRASIL
Curriculum
Dr. Clovis R. Maliska holds a full professor position at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his main research activities are numerical methods for heat transfer and fluid flow with emphasis on finite volume methods for unstructured grids applied to petroleum reservoir simulation, aerodynamics and multiphase flows.
Abstract
The design of horizontal well is of key importance in oil production, since the length of the well and the type of the completion will dictate the oil production rate. This analysis requires the solution of the Darcy’s flow in the reservoir and the multiphase flow in the wells. However, the well design is normally performed not considering pressure distribution in the near well region, whose gradients are of utmost importance for the predictions. The numerical kernel of the software developed in this project solves both flows, reservoir and well, in a coupled way, considering arbitrary well trajectories and anisotropy/heterogeneity of the reservoir. Corner-point grids, as normally used by the petroleum engineers, are supported by the code, WellRes 1.0, which is written in a C++ algorithm oriented programming. The application holds a highly intuitive interface with a complete suite of visualization tools. The development was supported by Petrobras – Brazilian Oil Industry, with a partnership with ESSS-Engineering Simulation and Scientific Software for the creation of the application, GUI and visualization tools.
