Proper Orthogonal Decomposition-Based Method for Predicting Flow and Heat Transfer of Oil and Water in Reservoir

Calculation process of some reservoir engineering problems involves several passes of full-order numerical reservoir simulations, and this makes it a time-consuming process. In this study, a fast method based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) was developed to predict flow and heat transfer of oil and water in a reservoir. The reduced order model for flow and heat transfer of oil and water in the hot water-drive reservoir was generated. Then, POD was used to extract a reduced set of POD basis functions from a series of “snapshots” obtained by a finite difference method (FDM), and these POD basis functions most efficiently represent the dynamic characteristics of the original physical system. After injection and production parameters are changed constantly, the POD basis functions combined with the reduced order model were used to predict the new physical fields. The POD-based method was approved on a two-dimensional hot water-drive reservoir model. For the example of this paper, compared with FDM, the prediction error of water saturation and temperature fields were less than 1.3% and 1.5%, respectively; what is more, it was quite fast, where the increase in calculation speed was more than 70 times.