Optimal control solving of polymer flooding based on a hybrid genetic algorithm

This paper researches the optimization of injection strategies of polymer flooding in oil recovery. An optimal control problem (OCP) of a distributed parameter system (DPS) is established, in which the functional of performance index is profit maximum and the governing equations are the fluid equations in porous media. The control variables are chosen as the polymer concentrations and the switching time of a slug. The constraint conditions include boundary constraints and other inequality constraints. A hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA), which makes use of the position displacement strategy of the particle swarm optimizer (PSO) as a mutation operation, is applied to solve the OCP. Finally, an example of the OCP for polymer flooding is exposed and the results show that the HGA method is effective and feasible.