Why Sensor?

EFFICIENCY

EXPERIENCE

EVIDENCE

EXCELLENCE

Sensor delivers a step-change in reservoir simulator reliability and performance.  Efficiency of the simulation engine is by far the most critical factor in the efficiency of any simulation workflow using any given optimization method.  Sensor's efficiency is in part due to its superior formulation and its very fast linear solvers, which help to make it many times faster than any other full-physics model.  Another reason is experience.  Sensor is the latest of many generations of simulators developed by Dr. Keith H. Coats.  In fact, Dr. Coats has developed more commercial reservoir simulators than any other person, team, or company.  And, Brian Coats is also one of the more experienced simulator developers.  He was a principal member of the VIP and Nexus simulator development teams, and the only principal member of both of those teams, for almost 20 years.  None of our competitors have developed any successive generations of simulators.    We've developed many successive generations of reservoir simulators with continuous and iterative improvement for the last 45 years.  It's our exclusive occupation, besides support of course.  Coats Engineering provides by far the highest level and quality of reservoir engineering program service, support, and advice that is available anywhere.  We offer evidence of Sensor's true and superior next-generation performance in the form of an evaluation version with data and documentation, which you can run to obtain current results and performance for industry benchmarks and other reproducible cases. No other vendor reveals the performance of their model on any reproducible benchmarks, because their models can't even come close to the state-of-the-art in reservoir simulation, which is represented by Sensor.  Any integration requirements with your best-of-breed workflow components, including couplings to facility and geomechanical models,  are completely insignificant compared to the productivity improvements that you can achieve by using Sensor.  Runs can be made with Sensor at a rate typically 3 to 10 times higher than can be achieved using any other model.  That advantage doubles or more when compared to any parallel model.  Where it applies, using Sensor will save huge amounts of time, money, hardware, and energy.  We can prove it.

FEATURES

Sensor has the features needed for simulation of most isothermal oil and gas recovery processes.  It simulates black oil and compositional fluids in single-porosity, dual-porosity, and dual-permeability reservoirs.  Its ability to automatically convert compositional descriptions to black oil or miscible representations provides unparalleled ease in determining the required complexity of the characterization. Compositional fluids subject to first-contact miscibility can be automatically pseudoized for large performance increase with no loss of accuracy.  Its stable step logic in Impes formulation is state-of-the-art.  Its stress- and porosity-dependent treatment of rock compaction with hysteresis and water weakening is the most advanced treatment available short of a coupled geomechanical model.  Multiple, unconnected reservoirs with different fluid descriptions are solved faster because they are solved independently.  Tracers have little or moderate effect on Impes performance.  Its implicit well model handles crossflow automatically, with options available for turbulent gas flow, SWAG (simultaneous water and gas) injection, cycle control for WAG injection, regional pressure control, drawdown control, and more.

EASE OF USE

Sensor is as easy to use as a reservoir simulator can be.  Dynamic dimensioning eliminates the need for any user-specified dimensions. The documentation reflects the logical structure of the data file, and is easy to follow and understand.  It’s filled with examples, advice for proper and most efficient usage, and references to the large number of provided example cases.  All Sensor input data is contained in a single data file, or the data can be modularized (apportioned into separate files) in any manner desired using "include" files.  Beyond formulation and solver selection, tuning is rarely needed, and because of its superior formulation, Sensor has a fraction of the tuning controls needed by other models.  We offer basic tools for plotting and 2D mapping of results at no charge, and more advanced pre- and post-processing applications, including fully integrated seismic-to-simulation workflows, user interfaces for data preparation and job submission, and 3D visualization, are offered by third parties.

ADVANCED WORKFLOW SIMULATION ENGINE

Sensor is also the most efficient simulation engine available, and the easiest model to link to, for your or third party implementations within advanced workflows for uncertainty evaluation, history matching, and optimization.  Use of Sensor within advanced workflows in a distributed, grid, cluster, or multiprocessor computing environment has the potential to deliver orders of magnitude speedup, and multiplies Sensor's ability to help you make reservoir studies with unprecedented resolution and accuracy.

NODE-LOCKED LICENSING

A single node-locked Sensor license does not limit the number of simultaneous users or processes, and allows you to make full use of the capabilities of any machine, limited by machine memory only.  This enables efficient probabilistic forecasting and optimization workflows, due to the large numbers of jobs usually needed (see our SensorPx page and the given examples).  Queuing software is available from Santec that allows multiple engineers to build their jobs on their local machine and queue them to Sensor running on a centralized workstation or server.  Simulation software costs can be reduced by an order or magnitude, with an overall benefit of 2 orders of magnitude, due to Sensor's superior performance and reliability.

Sensor Optimizes Your Optimizations