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Study of Capillary Pressure Effect on Multiphase Flow in Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

Biglarian, Hassan | 2009

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 39764 (08)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Mechanical Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Taghizadeh Manzari, Mehrdad
  7. Abstract:
  8. One of the most important issues in the petroleum industry, is how to increase the oil production from hydrocarbon reservoirs. The optimum design of an enhanced oil recovery process needs the knowledge on the physical phenomena of the working flow in oil reservoirs. An important aspect of any oil recovery process is the effectiveness of process fluid in removing oil from the rock pores at microscopic scales, in a way that it determines the success or failure of the recovery process. Meanwhile, one of the most important factors on the fluid mobility and as a result the microscopic mobility efficiency is the pressure difference between different phases in narrow paths of porous media. This pressure difference which is caused by the surface interaction between different phases and capillary forces, is usually characterized by capillary pressure function. Nowadays, the design of recovery strategy is heavily affected by numerical simulation in order that by simulating different injection processes, we can find efficient recovery techniques and make the reservoir production economically reasonable. Simulation is also very useful in many phenomena regarding oil reservoirs, such as capillary pressure. So far, many physical models and different numerical methods have been used to simulate multiphase multi-component flows in oil reservoirs. Black-Oil model is one of the physical models that considers the reservoirs fluid composed of three components (oil, gas and water) distributed in three phases (liquid, vapor and aqua). In this model the effect of mass transfer between the phases is considered. One of the basic assumptions of Black-Oil model is isotherm flow and unifying all the hydrocarbons components in two components of oil and gas.
    In this thesis, to study the effects of capillary pressure, Black-Oil model is generalized by formulating global pressure. The resulted governing equations include a parabolic pressure equation and a system of parabolic mass conservation equations. To solve these equations, a sequential method is used, i.e. by using finite volume method the pressure equations implicitly and mass conservation equations explicitly are solved. The numerical method used to solved mass conservation equations is a high-resolution central scheme proposed by Kurganov and Tadmor which is suitable for solving the degenerate advection-diffusion mass conservation equations. By using this method, we can capture the shocks and discontinuities with high accuracy and low computational costs in comparison with other shock-capturing methods. In order to solve the governing equations by using numerical methods, a computer program for one dimensional condition is generated and by that several problems regarding capillary pressure are solved. Comparing the results with the works of some reliable references approves that the physical model and numerical method are of high accuracy.
  9. Keywords:
  10. Capillary Pressure ; Porous Media ; Hydrocarbon Reservoirs ; Black-Oil Model ; Global Pressure

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