Improved streamlines and time-of-flight for streamline simulation on irregular grids

Streamline methods have shown to be effective for reservoir simulation. For a regular grid, it is common to use the semi-analytical Pollock’s method to obtain streamlines and time-of-flight coordinates (TOF). The usual way of handling irregular grids is by trilinear transformation of each grid cell to a unit cube together with a linear flux interpolation scaled by the Jacobian. The flux interpolation allows for fast integration of streamlines, but is inaccurate even for uniform flow. To improve the tracing accuracy, we introduce a new interpolation method, which we call corner-velocity interpolation. Instead of interpolating the velocity field based on discrete fluxes at cell edges, the new method interpolates directly from reconstructed point velocities given at the corner points in the grid. This allows for reproduction of uniform flow, and eliminates the influence of cell geometries on the velocity field. Using several numerical examples, we demonstrate that the new method is more accurate than the standard tracing methods.