PNG 430Reservoir Modeling

3 credits · Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering · Penn State

PNG 430 is a senior-level undergraduate class where the student explores the fundamentals of hydrocarbon reservoir simulation as the area of reservoir engineering in which computer power becomes essential for predicting complex processes and fluid behavior involved in fluid transport in porous media. In this class, numerical models are built on the basis of finite-difference and finite-volume approximations of governing equations of fluid flow in porous media, which integrate conservation of mass, isothermal fluid PVT behavior, and Darcy's flow approximations. Topics include the use of Taylor Series, volume integrals, grid types, treatment of external (reservoir limit) and internal (wellbore) boundary conditions, generalized transmissibility calculations, matrix solution methods and solution of systems of simultaneous algebraic equations, treatment of space and time-derivatives, explicit and implicit schemes, stability analysis, and applications to single-phase (incompressible, slightly-compressible and compressible fluid) numerical simulation. More advanced topics such as black-oil multiphase modeling and compositional modeling are introduced, including multiphase transmissibility calculations and multiphase solution techniques such as IMPES (Implicit-Pressure, Explicit Saturation) and multivariate Newton-Raphson.