Alternative conception of the monitoring and optimization of water flooding of oil reservoirs  under instability of displacement front

• The theory of Buckley and Leverett does not take into account the loss of stability of the displacement front whch provokes a stepwise change and the triple value of water saturation. Traditionally a mathematically simplified approach was proposed: a differentiable approximation to eliminate the ' jump' in water saturation. Such a simplified solution led to negative consequences well-know from the water flooding practice, recognized by experts as 'viscous instability of the displacement front' and 'fractal geometry of the displacement front'.The core of the issue is to attempt to predict the beginning of the stability loss of the front of oil displacement by water and to prevent its negative effect on the water flooding process under difficult conditions of interaction of hydro-thermodynamic, capillary, molecular, inertial, and gravitational forces. In this study, catastrophe theory methods applied for the analysis of nonlinear polynomial dynamical systems are used as a novel approach. namely, a mathematical growth model is developed and an inverse problem is formulated so that the initial coefficients of the system of differential equations for a two-phase flow can be determined using this model. A unified control parameter has been selected which enables one to propose and validate a discriminant criterion for  oil and water growth models for monitoring and optimization.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Annan naturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Other Natural Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Filtration of multi-phase fluids

water-flooding system

monitoring of oil well exploitation

growth models

discriminant analysis

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)