An OpenFOAM Application for Solving the Black Oil Problem

Abstract

An OpenFOAM application to address black oil problems using the finite volume technique is presented, along with the first results of the new solver. The black oil formulation is well known in petroleum reservoir engineering and widely implemented in primary and secondary recovery processes. Simulation of three-phase flow in porous media including fluid and rock compressibility requires careful consideration in the numerical model in order to guarantee a conservative calculation. Therefore, a detailed mathematical model and its implementation, with emphasis on the numerical treatment, are presented in this work. The solver is validated over several case studies comparing its results against a semi-analytical solution and those obtained by both in house and commercial simulators reported in the literature, thus proving to successfully represent compressible and incompressible multiphase flow in porous media.