Analysis of Coupled and Fully Integrated Models for Low-frequency Electrical Heating Assisted Heavy Oil Recovery

We have studied low frequency heating for heavy oil recovery accompanied by salt water recirculation around electrode wells. The multiphysics nature of this problem naturally calls for a code coupling solution. The main objective of this work is to develop an efficient methodology for such coupling. We address the coupling paradigm which includes questions about the degree of coupling (with respect to synthesis), grid and solver type used in the simulation of each separate problem, problem stability and accuracy, interpolation strategy, parallelization, etc. The implemented solution was validated and applied. We coupled a finite volume (FV) reservoir simulator (Stars) to a general purpose finite element (FE) simulator (COMSOL Multiphysics) used to compute an approximation to Maxwell’s equations. These two simulators are coupled by an in-house coupler written in Matlab, being its critical step the bi-direction mapping of interpolation/integration of data between the FE and FV mesh. Selection of solver parameters has been confirmed to be critical in order to limit the effect of numerical dispersion. Coupling solutions, such as the one described in this paper, allow developing simulation tools that reuse as much as possible specialized and existing tools. Their application to practical problems proves to be useful.