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Summary A great deal of research has been focused on transient two-phase flow in wellbores. However, there is lack of a comprehensive two-fluid model in the literature. In this paper, we present an implementation of a pseudo-compositional, thermal, fully implicit, transient two-fluid model for two-phase flow in wellbores. In this model, we solve gas/liquid mass balance, gas/liquid momentum balance, and two-phase energy balance equations to obtain five primary variables: liquid velocity, gas velocity, pressure, holdup, and temperature. This simulator can be used as a stand-alone code or can be used in conjunction with a reservoir simulator to mimic wellbore/reservoir dynamic interactions. In our model, we consider stratified, bubbly, intermittent, and annular flow regimes using appropriate closure relations for interphase and wall-shear stress terms in the momentum equations. In our simulation, we found that the interphase and wall-shear stress terms for different flow regimes can significantly affect the model's results. In addition, the interphase momentum transfer terms mainly influence the holdup value. The outcome of this research leads to a more accurate simulation of multiphase flow in the wellbore and pipes, which can be applied to the surface facility design, well-performance optimization, and wellbore damage estimation.
Abstract Three hydrocarbon phases can co-exist at equilibrium at relatively low temperatures in many CO2 floods. Formation of an aqueous phase in contact with hydrocarbon phases is inevitable in almost all recovery processes, because of the permanent presence of water in the reservoirs either as injection fluid or as initial formation water. Successful modeling of CO2 flooding requires accounting for the presence of four phases. However, as the number of phases increase, flash calculations become more difficult and time-consuming. A possible approach to reduce the computational time of the phase equilibrium calculations is to use reduced methods. This paper presents a general strategy to model the behavior of CO2/hydrocarbon/water systems where four equilibrium phases occur using a reduced flash approach. The speedup obtained by a reduced flash algorithm compared to the conventional flash approach is demonstrated for a different number of components and phases. The results show a significant speedup in the Jacobian matrix construction and in Newton-Raphson iterations using the reduced method when four phases are present. The computational advantage of the reduced method increases rapidly with the number of phases and components. The developed four-phase reduced flash algorithm is used to investigate the effect of introducing water on the phase behavior of two West Texas oil/CO2 mixtures. The results show significant changes in the phase splits and saturation pressures by adding water to these CO2/hydrocarbon systems.