Accelerated Phase Equilibrium Predictions for Subsurface Reservoirs Using Deep Learning Methods

Abstract

Multiphase fluid flow with complex compositions is an increasingly attractive research topic with more and more attentions paid on related engineering problems, including global warming and green house effect, oil recovery enhancement and subsurface water pollution treatment. Prior to study the flow behaviors and phase transitions in multi-component multiphase flow, the first effort should be focused on the accurate prediction of the total phase numbers existing in the fluid mixture, and then the phase equilibrium status can be determined. In this paper, a novel and fast prediction technique is proposed based on deep learning method. The training data is generated using a selected VT dynamic flash calculation scheme and the network constructions are deeply optimized on the activation functions. Compared to previous machine learning techniques proposed in literatures to accelerate vapor liquid phase equilibrium calculation, the total number of phases existing in the mixture is determined first and other phase equilibrium properteis will be estimated then, so that we do not need to ensure that the mixture is in two phase conditions any more. Our method could handle fluid mixtures with complex compositions, with 8 different components in our example and the original data is in a large amount. The analysis on prediction performance of different deep learning models with various neural networks using different activation functions can help future researches selecting the features to construct the neural network for similar engineering problems. Some conclusions and remarks are presented at the end to help readers catch our main contributions and insight the future related researches.

A 6M digital twin for modeling and simulation in subsurface reservoirs

“…A remarkable progress was recognized in 2018, when a thermodynamically stable multiphase equilibrium calculation algorithm of hydrocarbon mixtures based on realistic equation of state (e.g., Peng-Robinson Equation of State) at specified moles, volume and temperature (NVT-flash) was generated and proposed Sun, 2018a, 2018b;Sun, 2019). Robustness of this algorithm is preserved by proved consistency with the first and second laws of thermodynamics and capillarity can be incorporated in this algorithm to extend the application into unconventional reservoirs (e.g., shale gas reservoirs and tight oil reservoirs) and carbon dioxide sequestration (with cubic-plus-association type of equation of states) (Zhang et al, 2019a(Zhang et al, , 2019bLi et al, 2020). Sparse grids method and parallel computing techniques have been involved in further studies to accelerate the phase equilibrium estimation on parallel computers (Wu et al, 2015a).…”