Three-phase immiscible displacement in heterogeneous petroleum reservoirs

We describe a fractional-step numerical procedure for the simulation of inurtiscible three-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media that takes into account capillary pressure and apply it to indicate the existence of a so-called "transitional" wave in at least some multi-dimensional flows, thereby extending theoretical results for one-dimensional flows. The step procedure combines a second-order, conservative central difference scheme for a pertinent system of conservation laws modeling the convective transport of the fluid phases with locally conservative mixed finite elements for the associated parabolic and elliptic problems. (c) 2006 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.