Numerical Simulation of Multiphase Flows in Porous Media

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The Department of Mathematics at the University of Wyoming will purchasecomputer equipment which will be dedicated to the support of research inthe mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for severalresearch projects, including in particular: the numerical simulation ofthree-phase porous-media flows, the investigation of the the scale-upproblem for such flows, the development of particle tracking schemes fornonlinear conservation laws and of parallel adaptive multi-scale finiteelement methods that can be applied to them. The projects aimat advancing the state-of-the-art in modeling and simulation of fluidflow in porous media such as oil reservoirs and aquifers. They willexplore new computational algorithms, both for sequential and parallelcomputers, the incorporation of complex fluid physics, and eventuallywill apply these methods to the study of enhanced oil recoverytechniques which are already used in the state of Wyoming as well aselsewhere in the United States. Thus, the projects will have a largesocial impact on the state of Wyoming, due to its concentration ofnatural resources in gas, coal and oil reservoirs, and ultimately on theU.S. maintaining its leadership role in applied computational science ina field of high importance to today's world economy. On a differentscale, the projects span several disciplines and are tuned to theUniversity of Wyoming mission of interdisciplinary computational sciencein its academic plan. Existing research links between the Departments ofMathematics, Statistics, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Chemistry,Computer Science, as well as the Institute for Enhanced Oil Recovery andthe School for Energy Resources will be stimulated, and will result inattracting additional students in the existing programs. The project iscoupled tightly with an on-going education plan aimed at developing bothan undergraduate and a graduate curriculum in Computational Science, tobe offered through some of the above departments above as a minor. Thisminor has already been approved at the College of Arts level for theMathematics Department where the emphasis will be on training studentsin high-performance computing and its use in the study of complexphysics, with first undergraduate students expected this Fall. Otherdepartments and the graduate program are expected to follow graduallyover the next couple of years.