Overview of CFD Multiphase Flow Simulation Tools for Subsea Oil and Gas System Design, Optimization and Operation

Abstract

Due to the recent drop in the oil prices, the oil and gas industry is experiencing tremendous pressures to reduce costs. This is especially true for both Subsea Production Systems (SPS) development and operations to ensure profitability while meeting increasing regulatory requirements. In the last years, the modelling and simulation of multiphase flows has become a powerful engineering tool to conduct virtual experiments during design and development for many industries, such as aerospace, automotive, energy and healthcare. This is mainly due to the significant improvement of the modelling approaches which include more details of multiphase flow physics and phenomena. An additional growth contribution is due to the rapid development of the computational resources and computer power. The oil and gas industry can benefit from high fidelity multiphase flow modelling and simulation tools to minimize the cost of production system design during the project development phase as well as to support optimized operation and assessment of production performance. Because of the low-risk virtual environment, the use of multiphase flow modelling and simulation tools will also reduce the cost of physical testing, assist development of new technologies, and the evaluation of novel concepts. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of multiphase flow simulation tools and their recent evolution and adaptation for subsea applications. The focus is on multiphase flow modelling using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation tools, and in particular on their capabilities and limitations when applied to predict the hydrocarbons behavior throughout their journey from the reservoir to the processing facility. Applications of multiphase CFD tools to support the design, operation and monitoring of SPS and the developments and validations required for replacing costly laboratory tests, component qualification and field tests are also addressed and discussed.

Research on multi-phase flow test and flow simulation test in energy enterprise automation

“…When layered flow occurs, the time domain signal and flow pattern are shown in Figure 2. As can be seen from Figure 2, when the apparent velocity of gas and liquid phase is small, the differential pressure timedomain signal and flow pattern present a layered flow, which is in a relatively stable state with only a small range of fluctuation (Gharaibah et al, 2015). At this time, the oil pipeline is normal, there is no blockage and other circumstances.…”

Entropy–stable discontinuous Galerkin approximation with summation–by–parts property for the incompressible Navier–Stokes/Cahn–Hilliard system

“…However these 1D modeling tools are limited as they cannot capture some physical details, specially where three-dimensional effects are important. This means that resolving fast transient phenomena (e.g., slug flow) still presents limitations in current 1D modeling tools [4]. A different approach is followed by multiphase flow simulation based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), that permits detailed three-dimensional (3D) simulations of immiscible fluids including effects of pressure, temperature and liquid-gas heat and mass transfer.…”

“…Fig 4. Two-phase solver: flow pattern map of the two-phase flow in a horizontal pipe with a diameter of 1 meter.…”

Theoretical Investigation to Develop a Fit-for-purpose CFD Code to Simulate Transient Incompressible Two-phase Flow

“…The governing equations describing the fluid behaviors, i.e continuity and momentum equations, have to be solved separately and the VOF is not a standalone flow solving algorithm (the same applies for all other advection algorithms). Several recent studies have been carried out by different researchers in the past few years using commercial packages to deploy the CFD in oil and gas industry (Tocci et al (2017); Gharaibah et al (2015) and Khaksarfard et al (2013)). VOF has been considered in some of these works and the outcomes showed good agreements between measured and calculated values.…”