Author(s)

V.P.S. King, L. Landau, J.L.D. Alves & M.A.D. Martins

Abstract

This work presents the implementation of a finite element code for the thermal transient analysis of sedimentary rocks. This analysis provides a means to assess the thermal history in sedimentary rocks, assisting the studies of hydrocarbon generation and migration processes. The unstructured 3D mesh of tetrahedral elements provides the discrete model. An iterative driver using an edge-by-edge data structure solves the resulting system of equations at each time step. This strategy provides considerable improvements in terms of CPU time and memory demand. This combination enables the study of complex 3D problems, a key issue to basin analysis. 1 Introduction In recent

Keywords