CFD Applied to Process Development in the Oil and Gas Industry – A Review

Abstract

-Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is increasingly used in the oil and gas industry. The present article aims to show how CFD can be used at all steps of the development of a new process, with a focus on refining technologies. Those different steps consist first of setting up tools that will be used during the development phase, second of obtaining data in complement with experiments required for the process development, and finally, of troubleshooting actions or technology developments that will make the process even more efficient. A large number of applications corresponding to various flow configurations, single-phase or gas-liquid, gas-solid or even gas-liquid-solid, characterised by significantly different scales and requiring adapted simulation approaches, are discussed based on original results and a review of the literature. Perspectives are given in particular on the multi-scale approach and physical phenomena coupling.Résumé -La simulation numérique des écoulements appliquée au développement de procédés dans le monde de l'industrie du pétrole et du gaz -une revue -La simulation numérique des écoulements, ou Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), est un outil de plus en plus employé dans les secteurs pétrolier et gazier. Cet article permet d'illustrer comment l'outil numérique est utilisé lors des différents stades de développement d'un nouveau procédé, en particulier dans le monde du raffinage. Ces différentes phases correspondent tout d'abord à la mise au point des équipements qui seront utilisés pour le développement, puis au complément des essais lors de la phase de développement proprement dite et enfin à des actions support pour la résolution de problèmes opératoires ou l'amélioration de technologies qui permettront d'optimiser le procédé. De nombreuses applications correspondant à différents types d'écoulements, monophasique ou gaz-liquide, gazsolide et gaz-liquide-solide, caractérisées par des échelles de résolution différentes et requérant des approches de simulations adaptées sont discutées sur la base de résultats originaux et d'une revue de travaux déjà publiés. Des perspectives sont aussi données tant sur les aspects approche multi-échelles que sur le couplage de phénomènes.

Development and verification of CFD model of carbothermal synthesis furnace for production of mixed nitride uranium-plutonium fuel

“…For the past three decades, there has been an increasing tendency to use the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods for computational justifications of engineering solutions in designing various industrial facilities (Spalart and Venkatakrishnan 2016, Raynal et al 2016, Mizzi et al 2015, Joshi and Nayak 2019. Using modern CFD codes enables modeling heat and mass transport, hydro-and gas dynamics hard to reproduce experimentally.…”

CFD simulation of annular oil flow wrapped with water

“…[10] Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used in the oil and gas industry. [4] For instance, the drilling and refinement of heavy oil have been evaluated using CFD. [5,6] Previous studies have dealt with vertical or horizontal flow in tubes or pipes.…”

Prediction of sulfur content in propane and butane after gas purification on a treatment unit

“…Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been emerged as a proven technology which offers an alternative way to address problems with no specific relationship between input and output parameters. The main advantage of such models over existing approaches is the capability of learning and generalizing data, fault tolerance and inherent contextual information processing in addition to fast computation potential (Raynal et al, 2016). Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for applications where the complexity of the data or task demands high computational costs (Haghbakhsh et al, 2012;Adib et al, 2013Adib et al, , 2015Moradi et al, 2016).…”