| This project was aimed to apply the PVM system to a problem related to petroleum engineering. A program was written to solve a heat transfer problem in order to get the temperature distribution for a heavy oil reservoir heated by an electrical electrode. Results indicate that it takes a long time (1000 days) to increase the temperature from 100°F to 222°F. This suggests that conduction alone is not sufficient to raise temperature of the reservoir to a meaningful level and convection plays a more significant role in propagating heat deep into the reservoir. The results were validated by reproducing the results of a problem with same specifications in literature. Also, the performance of the parallel code was obtained by generating speedup curves. A maximum speedup of 3.63 was obtained using 4 processors, which shows that parallel computing can reduce the overall computation time of this problem by 72 %. |
