Chief scientist  (Prof., Dr. Ing.)

Phone: +47 22067710 Cellphone: +47 93058721 Email: Beskyttet adresse Department: Applied Mathematics Research Unit:   SINTEF ICT Location: Forskningsveien 1, Oslo         Add to contacts (vCard)

Selected projects:   GeoScale   Matlab Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST)   MatMoRA   Geilo winter schools    IGEMS CO2               University website

Background

Dr. Knut-Andreas Lie is chief scientist at SINTEF. He holds a PhD in mathematics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and a MSc (siv.ing.) in industrial mathematics from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH). After graduation, he spent one year as a postdoc at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo before joining SINTEF in 1999 as research director for the former Department of Numerical Simulation. After a reorganization of SINTEF in 2004, he built up a new research group that focuses on subsurface flow and numerical solution of partial differential equations.

Knut-Andreas is Professor II at the Department of Mathematics, University of Bergen and senior scientist at the Centre of Mathematics for Applications (CMA), a national Center of Excellence at the University of Oslo. He is also affiliated with the Center for Integrated Operations in the Oil Industry at NTNU in Trondheim and the SUCCESS center for CO₂ storage at CMR and the University of Bergen. Through these university affilitations, he has supervised fourteen doctoral and twenty-six master students.

Knut-Andreas has published more than 90 scientific papers, one monograph, and three edited volumes. He is currently associate editor for SPE Journal and Journal of Mathematics in Industry and Program Director for the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences.

Research Interests

Knut-Andreas' main research interest is numerical methods for flow and transport in porous rock formations with applications in reservoir simulation and CO₂ storage. Since his PhD studies, he has worked on efficient transport solvers and, in particular, efficient methods such as streamlines, front tracking, fast-marching, and causality-based methods for advective and/or gravitational transport. Since 2004, he has worked on consistent discretization methods and multiscale methods for direct solution of elliptic pressure equations on complex grid models of highly heterogeneous and fractured porous media. The resulting multiscale pressure solvers can be used as upscaling methods and are then more accurate and robust than industry-standard upscaling methods. Similarly, when used as a direct solver on highly detailed geomodels, multiscale solvers are typically orders-of-magnitude faster than standard pressure solvers. Recently, he has also developed a set of accompanying, multi-fidelity, transport solvers that utilize flow-based grids for speeding up computations. Knut-Andreas has also worked on other topics such as streamline-based history matching, Riemann solvers for 3-phase and miscible flows, accurate multipoint discretization of faults, vertical equilibrium models for CO₂ migration, and the impact of geological uncertainty on risk assment of CO₂ storage.

Knut-Andreas is a believer of open-access publishing and open-sources software. As a doctoral student, he started the Hyperbolic Conservation Laws Preprint Server in 1996; the server is still active and contains around 800 preprints. More recently, he initiated two open-source initiatives: the Matlab Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST) developed by SINTEF and the Open Porous Medium (OPM) initiative supported by Statoil, Total, and various German and Norwegian research groups.

Knut-Andreas is also interested in GPU computing applied to high-resolution methods for conservation and balance laws, including, in particular, gas dynamics and shallow-water waves. In a prior life, he was an expert on front tracking and analysis and development of operator splitting methods for nonlinear hyperbolic and parabolic PDEs.

Recent journal publications (Show all publications up to 2011)

1. F. O. Alpak, M. Pal, and K.-A. Lie. A multiscale method for modeling flow in stratigraphically complex reservoirs. SPE J., Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 1056-1070, 2012. DOI: 10.2118/140403-PA
2. H. M. Nilsen, A. R. Syversveen, K.-A. Lie, J. Tveranger, and J. M. Nordbotten. Impact of top-surface morphology on CO₂ storage capacity. Int. J. Greenhouse Gas Control, Vol. 11, pp. 221-235, 2012. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2012.08.012
3. H. M. Nilsen, K.-A. Lie, and J. R. Natvig. Accurate modelling of faults by multipoint, mimetic, and mixed methods. SPE J., Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 568-579, June 2012. DOI: 10.2118/149690-PA.
4. K.-A. Lie, J. R. Natvig, and H. M. Nilsen. Discussion of dynamics and operator splitting techniques for two-phase flow with gravity. Int. J Numer. Anal. Mod. (Special issue in memory of Magne Espedal), Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 684-700, 2012.
5. K.-A. Lie, S. Krogstad, I. S. Ligaarden, J. R. Natvig, H. M. Nilsen, and B. Skaflestad. Open source MATLAB implementation of consistent discretisations on complex grids. Comput. Geosci., Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 297-322, 2012. DOI: 10.1007/s10596-011-9244-4
6. V. L. Hauge, K.-A. Lie, and J. R. Natvig. Flow-based coarsening for multiscale simulation of transport in porous media. Comput. Geosci., Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 391-408, 2012. DOI: 10.1007/s10596-011-9230-x.
7. J. R. Natvig, B. Skaflestad, F. Bratvedt, K. Bratvedt, K.-A. Lie, V. Laptev, and S. K. Khataniar. Multiscale mimetic solvers for efficient streamline simulation of fractured reservoirs. SPE J., Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 880-880, 2011. DOI: 10.2018/119132-PA
8. M. Krotkiewski, I. Ligaarden, K.-A. Lie, D. W. Schmid. On the importance of the Stokes-Brinkman equations for computing effective permeability in carbonate karst reservoirs. Comm. Comput. Phys, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 1315-1332, 2011. DOI: 10.4208/cicp.290610.020211a
9. H. M. Nilsen, P. A. Herrera, M. Ashraf, I. S. Ligaarden, M. Iding, C. Hermanrud, K.-A. Lie, J. M. Nordbotten, H. K. Dahle, and E. Keilegavlen. Field-case simulation of CO₂-plume migration using vertical-equilibrium models. Energi Procedia, Vol. 4, pp. 3801-3808, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2011.02.315

Recent proceedings papers

1. K.-A. Lie, H. M. Nilsen, A. F. Rasmussen, and X. Raynaud. Fast simulation of polymer injection in heavy-oil reservoirs based on topological sorting and sequential splitting. Paper 163599 presented at the 2013 SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 18-20 February 2013.
2. O. Møyner and K.-A. Lie. The multiscale finite volume method on unstructured grids. Paper SPE 163649 presented at the 2013 SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 18-20 February 2013.
3. M. Pal, S. Lamine, K.-A. Lie, and S. Krogstad Multiscale method for simulating two and three-phase flow in porous media. Paper SPE 163669 presented at the 2013 SPE Reservoir Simulation Symposium, The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 18-20 February 2013.

Book

1. H. Holden, K. H. Karlsen, K.-A. Lie, and N. H. Risebro. Splitting Methods for Partial Differential Equations with Rough Solutions: Analysis and Matlab Programs. EMS Series of Lectures in Mathematics, Vol. 11, European Mathematical Society Publishing House, 2010. Extra material: open-source Matlab codes.