Wednesday, March 24
JP1
Synthetic Environments for Modeling Subsurface and Surface Flows
8:30 AM-9:30 AM
Room: Texas Ballroom B
Chair: Richard Sincovec, University of Texas, San Antonio
Effective management of reservoirs, aquifers, bays and estuaries
demands rapid, reliable forecasts of behavior. Length scales of
practical and economic interest range from tens of meters to
kilometers. A large disparity in time scales also exists, from nearly
instantaneous chemical reactions to daily tidal movements to water
infiltration into waste repositories for millennia. Moreover
different physical processes occur simultaneously in different parts
of the domain.(e.g. single phase flow within an aquifer, multiphase
flow in the vadose zone above the aquifer, and shallow water
transport in a river or wetland in contact with the porous media.)
A synethetic computational environment which allows for multiple
physical models, multiple discretizations and solvers, and
flexibility in coupling of different physical models can greatly
increase the productivity of the scientist and engineer as a tool for
understanding complex physics and for making critical decisions.
In this presentation we discuss two different synthetic environments.
The first involves a framework for the integration of petroleum
reservoir production. One of the major obstacles here is the tight
coupling of the chemistry, physics, and geology in the nonlinear
systems. The second environment we consider involves water quality
modeling in bays and estaries. Here the chemistry does not affect the
flow, but flow data output from the hydrodynamics part of the
simulator can be quite large and frequently needs to be projected in
a locally conservative fashion onto another grid before use in the
reactive transport portion of the code or module. Computational
results for both of these frameworks are presented.
This plenary talk will be presented in a joint session of the
Geosciences and the Parallel Processing conferences.
Mary F. Wheeler
Center for Subsurface Modeling, University of Texas, Austin
MMD, 1/29/98