Mathematical Modeling of Optimal Control Strategy for Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes, 2016

Advisors: Kundan Kumar and Florin Radu

Short description of the project:

In this study, we developed a mathematical model for 2D microbial EOR technology. It consists of an average pressure formulation of two-phase flow and component advection-diffusion reactive transport models. An IFT reduction mechanism has been used to couple porous media flow and transport phenomena. A cell-centered control volume and backward Euler methods were applied to discretize the flow and transport equations. An iterative linearization technique is implemented in Matlab to solve the resulting system of non-linear algebraic equations. Numerical experiments were conducted on two-phase flow, advection-diffusion transport, and the coupled microbial EOR models for different mobility and capillary pressure parameterizations. Moreover, we have proposed a new microbial EOR optimization model to maximize the sweep efficiency by controlling the slug size injection strategy. In this thesis, we have also proposed a new optimization algorithm based on gradient accent and iterative linearization methods to handle the microbial EOR optimization model numerically. A number of illustrative numerical experiments have been done to analyze the effect of slug size and the cost of microbial concentration.

Link to the thesis at Bora-UiB: https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/handle/1956/12544