Speeding up the reservoir simulation by real time prediction of the initial guess for the Newton-Raphson’s iterations

Abstract

We study linear models for the prediction of the initial guess for the nonlinear Newton-Raphson solver. These models use one or more of the previous simulation steps for prediction, and their parameters are estimated by the ordinary least-squares method. A key feature of the approach is that the parameter estimation is performed using data obtained directly during the simulation and the models are updated in real time. Thus we avoid the expensive process of dataset generation and the need for pre-trained models. We validate the workflow on a standard benchmark Egg dataset of two-phase flow in porous media and compare it to standard approaches for the estimation of initial guess. We demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to reduction in the number of iterations in the Newton-Raphson algorithm and speeds up simulation time. In particular, for the Egg dataset, we obtained a 30% reduction in the number of nonlinear iterations and a 20% reduction in the simulation time.