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A Decoupled Model for Compositional Multiphase Flow in Porous Media and Multiphysics Approaches for Two-Phase Flow

R. Helmig, Y. Cao, B. Faigle, B. Flemisch, and M. Wolff
University of Stuttgart, Germany

In many practical applications of porous media flow simulators, the most complex processes are confined to a small part of the model domain. The demands of a simulator on computational resources increase with the physical complexity of the model. Thus, a trade-off between physical accuracy and the computational demands of a model has to be made. Either great complexities are neglected in favor of a lean model or all processes are captured with a complex model which is superfluous in large parts of the domain. As a compromise between these options, a consistent transfer concept is introduced. It couples simple and complex models and adapts the resulting multiscale model to the physical processes actually occurring. As a basis for this, a decoupled formulation for non-isothermal compositional multiphase flow will be discussed. It has the advantage that the size of the linear system of equations does not grow with the number of phases or components involved.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #120034©2012 AAPG Hedberg Conference Fundamental Controls on Flow in Carbonates, Saint-Cyr Sur Mer, Provence, France, July 8-13, 2012