A Three-Dimensional Graphics Application for Numerical Simulations of Turbidity Currents in the Stratigraphic Modelling Process

Abstract

Turbidity currents occur in both natural and man-made situations. In agreement with some researcher s, most of the world’s oil reser ves are stored in hydrocarbon reser voir built by turbidity systems. Due to the importance of these currents, this work presents a three-dimensional graphics application for numerical simulations of turbidity currents called Turb3D. This application is based on a consistent and efficient numerical method for simulations of turbidity currents for basin sedimentations predictions in the stratigraphic modelling process. The algorithm used in the software is based on Navier-Stokes equations that are solved using a depth-averaged procedure. The application user interface provides a common, user-friendly, graphical environment for pre-processing, solution and postprocessing. Despite the good computational performance achieved by using this approach, experiments should be done in order to validate the proposed numerical method presented in this work.