Shell's new Modular Reservoir Simulator (MoReS) has been equipped with a comprehensive and versatile user interface called FrontEnd. Apart from providing a user-friendly environment for interactive reservoir simulation, FrontEnd serves as a software platform for other dynamic simulation and reservoir-engineering applications. It offers to all supported applications a common user interface, enables the re-use of code and reduces overall maintenance and support costs associated with the embedded applications. Because of its features, FrontEnd facilitates the transfer of research results in the form of operational software to end users.
When coupled with MoReS, FrontEnd can be used for pre- and post-processing and interactive simulation. The pre-processing options allow data to be inputted by means of various OSF/Motif widgets containing a spreadsheet, text editors, dialogues and graphical input. The display of the input data as well as the post-processing of all simulation results is made possible by a variety of user-defined plots of tabular (e.g. timestep summary) and array (simulation grid) data. During a simulation user-defined plots can be displayed and edited, allowing a close inspection of the results as they are being calculated. FrontEnd has been equipped with a powerful input command language, which gives the batch user as much flexibility and control over the input as the interactive user.
The introduction of powerful workstations offers opportunities to change the way reservoir simulations are carried out. Most current reservoir-simulation software require the engineer to assemble a data deck with a text editor or dedicated pre-processors, submit the run in batch mode, wait for its execution and then investigate the results using post-processing software. Yet current hardware is powerful enough to run interactive simulations whose results can be monitored as they are being calculated. Such interactive simulation can increase the efficiency of the engineer significantly. Since the data can be immediately displayed and validated, obvious errors can be detected early and alternative scenarios can be quickly evaluated.
To make Shell's new Modular Reservoir Simulation package MoReS fully interactive, it has been equipped with a versatile and powerful user interface called FrontEnd.
The MoReS reservoir simulator offers a large choice of fluid descriptions, ranging from standard black or volatile oil to user-specified multicomponent mixtures. In addition, tracers, polymers and chemical reactions are handled for various specialist applications (e.g. reservoir souring, environmental applications etc.). The simulator can be operated in either a non-fractured or fractured mode. In the latter case dual porosity, dual permeability and block-to-block flow (oil re-infiltration) can be taken into account.
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