Abstract: This paper presents a practical model for polymer flooding in which the complex chemical-physical phenomena and the capillary pressure effect are considered. And introducing transit time concept, the 3D saturation equation is decomposed into a set of 1D equations (hyperbolic equation and ellipse equation) by employing the operator splitting technique. With the 3D streamline simulator, the polymer flooding model can be calculated fast and accurately. The study shows that the little effect of capillary pressure on water flooding reservoir’ saturation (the maximum absolute error of the saturation is less than 0.02%) can be ignored, while the effect of it on polymer flooding reservoir’s saturation is larger (the maximum absolute error of the saturation is 7.5%), which should be an important factor for polymer flooding.

Key words: polymer flooding, capillary pressure, streamline method, operator splitting