Abstract

The goal of front tracking, for problems containing important discontinuous

behavior, is to combine the flexibility of a general-purpose hydrodynamics
calculation with the efficiency of a special purpose calculation.
Reservoir simulation problems involve the numerical fluid dynamics of multi phase
flow, specifically the computation of the flow of oil, water and/or gas in a porous
medium.
The fluid variables for these problems are pressure and the saturations. The
phases are oil, water and gas. Each rock pore is thought of as containing a single
phase, while a macroscopic region is characterized by its fractional volume
contents of the three phases. Typical "shocks" in such problems are discontinuities
in phase concentrations: the oil, gas or water banks.
Currently there are many developments in numerical methods that attempt to solve
problems where discontinuities are present in the solution of partial differential
equations. Particularly, the solutions of the governing equations of the flow of
hydrocarbons can be approximated numerically using well known as finite
difference or finite volume techniques. However, these techniques often introduce
what is known as "artificial diffusion" fronts causing fluid injection are not properly
defined during simulation. For this reason the application of Front Tracking method
is proposed to better resolve these fronts.
The purpose of this paper is to show the advantage of the front tracking method
compared to different methods commonly used in equations having the
aforementioned behaviors.