Persistent-variable thermal compositional simulation of multiphase flow with phase separation in porous media

Abstract

Thermal compositional multiphase flow in porous media with phase transitions involves complex nonlinear interactions among flow, transport, and phase equilibrium. This paper presents a persistent-variable formulation for thermal compositional flow using enthalpy to formulate the energy balance and the local equilibrium problem. Equilibrium conditions are derived from a thermodynamically consistent minimization problem using a persistent set of variables, allowing for seamless integration of equilibrium calculations into a fully coupled flow and transport model. This formulation does not require phase stability tests and provides a continuous and full mathematical description of the multiphysics system, suitable for challenging non-isothermal scenarios. To tackle the nonlinearities arising from phase transitions, we embed a local solver for the thermodynamic subproblem within a global Newton solver for the fully implicit system. The local solver exploits the locality of the subproblem for parallelization and leverages the modularity of the persistent-variable formulation for both isothermal and isenthalpic equilibrium conditions locally. We demonstrate the capability of our approach to simulate complex high-enthalpy systems, including narrow-boiling phenomena. The impact of the embedded local solver is analyzed through numerical experiments, demonstrating a reduction in global nonlinear iterations of up to 23 \% with increased use of the local solver. The number of local iterations is controlled with a local solver tolerance and no significant impact on the global iteration number was observed for local residual tolerances as high as $1e-3$. The persistent-variable approach using enthalpy and the modularity of the embedded local solver advance the usage of equilibrium calculations in multiphase flow simulations and are suitable for high-enthalpy applications.