Simulating Multiphase Flows in Porous Media Using OpenFOAM on Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Processors.

Multiphase flow in porous media is an important component in petroleum reservoir research. During the processing of oil exploration, the gas, liquid and solid particles may flow through porous media in a reservoir. A novel solver, named MPPICmultiphaseInterFoam1, was developed using OpenFOAM to simulate multiphase flows in the porous media of a reservoir. This solver is realized by coupling DPM (discrete particle modeling) and VOF (volume of fluid) with CFD (computational fluid dynamics) based on the MP-PIC (multiphase particle-in-cell) method. After validation, this solver was used to simulate multiphase flows in oil and gas reservoirs. The Intel Xeon Phi KNL (Knights Landing) processors on an HPC (high performance computing) system were employed to carry out the numerical simulations. Optimal performance was realized by parallel programming with MPI and vectorization based on the Intel Xeon Phi KNL processors. It was found that Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing processors are good to perform the large-scale simulations of multiphase flow in porous media.