Took some time to think about data visualization and how it can be used in the scope of RE (reservoir engineering).
Data visualization is an amazing subject that I am interested in doing. There is a nice overview under the Wikipedia entry “Scientific Visualization” There are courses available in Coursera I am gonna take later this year. It will be taught by Jonh Hart from Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) in UIUC. There was a course in Stanford taught by Jeffery Heer a couple of years ago. However, the whole group was moved to University of Washington, so no more in Stanford…
In the scope of petroleum E&P, the seismic and geomodeling parts need lots of visualization techniques. However, in reservoir engineering, there are still room for better use of data visualization.
I was staring at an attempt to visualize the reservoir model that I have done last year. The novel thing is that I have included the oil saturation and the flux in the visualization. However, this visualization is still not very representative. It is still obscure to see clearly what is happening in the reservoir.
So, I am looking forward some techniques to make really representative visualizations, yet display the fluxes and saturation at the same time.
- To use the idea of medial axis. Ideally, we can really understand everything what is going on inside a reservoir! Fluxes, saturation, pressures, etc…
- Maybe we can combine this idea with visualization of Streamline simulation.

Medial Axis represent the skeleton of the shape.

Streamline simulation features fancy visualizations.
Let’s see.