Phase-state identification bypass method for three-phase thermal compositional simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a strategy to bypass the phase identification of fluid mixtures that can form three, or more, phases. The strategy is used for reservoir simulation of multicomponent, three-phase, thermal compositional displacement processes. Since the solution path in compositional space is determined by a limited number of “key” tie-simplexes, the proposed “bypass” method uses information from the parameterized tie-simplexes and their extensions. The tie-simplex parameterization is performed in the discrete phase-fraction space. Once the phase-fraction space is discretized, a conventional three-phase flash is used adaptively to compute the phase states at the discretization nodes. If all discretization vertices of a given discrete cell, in phase-fraction space, have the same phase state, then this state is assigned to the entire cell and expensive flash calculations are bypassed. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our phase identification bypassing strategy for several cases with three-phase flow, including a six-component ES-SAGD (enhanced solvent SAGD) model.