Using Microcomputers as Reservoir Engineering Workstations

ABSTRACT The paper describes the software tools used to develop reservoir engineering software which are portable on a wide range of computers. These tools are: An APPLICATION LAUNCHER which hides the operating system commands to the user,A PROGRAM GENERATOR which is used to build all the screen based preprocessors,A library of graphic routines. Two examples are given to illustrate the usefulness of such software on MS-DOS micro computers: The first one is a single well model simulator which features a medium sided reservoir engineering application. The resulting package includes a preprocessor, a postprocessor and the numerical model simulator itself.The second one is related to the full field simulation of petroleum reservoirs. For such a high end application the microcomputers can be used to do the preprocessing and postprocessing tasks. Furthermore the numerical simulation of the three phase, three dimensional model can be performed on the new generation of 32 bits microcomputers. The two benchmarks which are presented show that the number crunching capabilities of microcomputers were considerably improved since the first IBM-PC was introduced. The last generation capabilities are close to those of minicomputers.