Fractals in Reservoir Engineering

Book excerpt: Many natural objects have been found to be fractal and fractal mathematics has been used to generate many beautiful ?nature? scenes. Fractal mathematics is used in image compression and for movies and is now becoming an engineering tool as well. This book describes the application of fractal mathematics to one engineering specialty ? reservoir engineering. This is the process of engineering the production of oil and gas. The reservoir engineer's job is to design and predict production from underground oil and gas reservoirs. The successful application of fractal mathematics to this engineering discipline should be of interest, not only to reservoir engineers, but to other engineers with their own potential applications as well. Geologists will find surprisingly good numerical descriptions of subsurface rock distributions. Physicists will be interested in the application of renormalization and percolation theory described in the book. Geophysicists will find the description of fluid flow scaling problems faced by the reservoir engineer similar to their problems of scaling the transport of acoustic signals.