ABSTRACT
Dynamic and static characterization of reservoirs is of great interest in the oil industry. A powerful tool to describe fluid flow in porous media is the numerical modeling of the involved physical processes. Through it, the behavior of the reservoir pressure and the in-situ oil saturation distribution can be determined. A biphasic isothermal tri-component model to analyze advection-diffusion in 2D porous media can be used to simulate oil and gas flow (in presence of static water) together with a third component called tracer. This model can describe flowing conditions in the area of well influence (radial model), 2D inter-well sections, and reservoir sectors (areal view), in which tracer injection studies are conducted. Models considering only the advective term in the fluid balance equation can be solved for pressure and saturation. However, the use of the diffusive term in the equation allows the dynamic characterization of the porous formation as fluids move towards producing wells. Within this subject, the use of tracers (chemical agents) has been seen as a very exciting technology (Zemel 1995). Tracers are transported through the diverse fluid phases in motion and can be detected at their arrival in the producing wells. Tracer breakthrough curves can be used therefore to identify flow paths in the reservoir, which manifest the specific heterogeneity in the test area.
