Engineering: Fully-funded PhD Studentship, Swansea University, UK

Representing complex heterogeneous structures of rocks and capturing their influence on complex thermal-mechanical processes occurring during hydrocarbon generation and production are important for practical use of simulation tools in oil & gas industries. Practical numerical simulation needs to be able to handle large models in terms of the number of simulation parameters to be solved on a huge number of spatially and temporary discretised domains. From the scale point of view, it needs to have an ability to homogenise and upscale/downscale models used to simulate processes on basin, field, wellbore, laboratory, grain and sub-grain scales. The physical behaviour is generally time dependent as well, and it needs to be correctly captured for large variety of time scales - from millennia to microseconds. All these make homogenisation and upscaling methods (HUMs) for Finite/Discrete Element codes very important and powerful items within the framework used for numerical simulation of oil & gas exploration and production processes.

This project is aimed to develop and validate a practical homogenization and upscaling technology that can be implemented to cope with commercial projects in oil & gas development and production. It will need to be scalable in broad sense - across the physical (both spatial & temporal) scales and HPC multi-core computers. The new HUM modelling strategy is expected to be able to accommodate a wide variety of rocks (shales, sand & muds), different reservoir liquids (gas, oil, water - assuming immiscibility within this project). One of the main industrial targets of the project is the analysis of the characterization and production of tight gas reservoirs using an advanced coupled geomechanical–fluid flow approach.

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