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Parallel numerical simulation of the ultrasonic waves in a prestressed formation.

Chen H, Wang X, Lin W

Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China.

Formation stress prediction plays an important role in petroleum production. Understanding ultrasonic wave propagation in a stress-induced anisotropic formation will help us to find an efficient method to correctly predict formation stress or formation pore pressure. In this work, a parallel 3D finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method is developed to simulate elastic wave propagation in pre-stressed formations. A perfectly matched layer (PML) is used as an absorbing boundary condition. The acceleration ration of total CPU computation time and the lasting time of the program run in the super computer-ShenTeng 6800 in the Super Computation Center of Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) are tested. It shows that the acceleration factor of the parallel FDTD program is considerably high even if the domain is only divided in one direction. When the total computation model size fixed, the acceleration factor of 8 CPU and 64 CPU is 3.0 and 13.8, respectively. The velocities under various static stresses are obtained by processing the array data calculated with the FDTD using Prony's method. The linear relation between velocity and the applied pre-stress is in agreement with that predicted by the acoustoelasticity theory. Results from the numerical simulation confirm the reciprocity principle and the superposition principle.

Published 1 January 2007 in Ultrasonics, 44: e1013-7.
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