A New Focus+Context Visualization Technique for Inspecting Black Oil Reservoir Models

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new visualization technique to inspect simulated black oil reservoir models. Numerical reservoir simulation is widely used in the oil & gas industry to predict and plan the exploration of petroleum fields. Of particular interest, it is crucial to understand the physical phenomena around injector and producer wells: how is the distribution of pressure, how oil/gas/water saturation varies over time, and others. Traditional visualization techniques only provide local insights, being hard to understand the three-dimension physical behavior. Another challenge is to handle today’s massive models. We propose an efficient and effective focus+context visualization technique employing a cutaway approach, having the wells as objects of interest. We explore cone-shaped and box-shaped view-dependent cutting surfaces. We also allow the user to control the cutting surface aperture freely and to freeze the cut to gain motion parallax depth cues during model exploration. The proposed rendering algorithm runs on GPU, delivering real-time frame rate even for large reservoir models.