New ideas for building SPAI preconditioners

• Grant number: 24/05345-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Mathematics - Applied Mathematics
• Agreement: Equinor (former Statoil)
• Principal Investigator: Alberto Vazquez Saa
• Grantee: Luan Thierry Silvino Pacifico
• Host Institution: Instituto de Matemática, Estatística e Computação Científica (IMECC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Company: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Engenharia Mecânica (FEM)
• Associated research grant: 17/15736-3 - Engineering Research Centre in Reservoir and Production Management, AP.PCPE

Abstract

This Work Package (WP) is a M.Sc. research project to explore new mathematical andcomputational ideas for building sparse approximate inverses (SPAI) for preconditioning ofreservoir simulation solvers, aiming possible implementations in the Open Porous Media(OPM) initiative [1], an international project devoted to develop and disseminate opensourcealternatives for realistic reservoir simulation.Reservoir simulation has become an essential tool for the oil and gas industry. Roughly,these tools are necessary to predict fluid dynamics based on physical models of thereservoirs and fluids, which are commonly built from different collected field data andlaboratory measurements. In a realistic field operation, typically a huge number of differentstrategies are tested to find optimal results. From a computational point of view, thesesimulations are enormously time and memory demanding, and the exploration of highperformancecomputational schemes for these applications is a timely fundamental researchtopic for both the Industry and Academia.Despite the unequivocal importance of the commercial software packages available today forreservoir simulation, the nature of their licenses (proprietary) prevents the properdevelopment of their capabilities in the Industry and Academia. Proprietary softwaresimulators are typically distributed without the underlying source code, which obviouslyprevents the user community from proposing, for instance, new features or improvements onthe already available packages. The open-source option, on the other hand, not only allowsthe participation of the user community but indeed promotes user contributions, leadingtypically a much faster and more reliable code development. The oil and gas industry andAcademia will certainly benefit from open-source projects like the OPM initiative, apotentially disruptive project that proposes the development and popularization of opensourcealternatives for the most commonly used proprietary reservoir simulation softwarepackages available today. The present WP aims to explore, from a mathematical andcomputational point of view, new preconditioning strategies for reservoir simulation, withpossible application to the reservoir simulation package of the OPM Initiative.The methodology of mathematical and computational research as the proposed in this WP isbased on extensive literature revisions and testing of new ideas with prototypical problemsaiming for possible applications to more realistic situations. (AU)