Comparison of Two Methods for Speeding up Flash Calculations in Compositional Simulations

Abstract

Abstract Flash calculation is the most time consuming part in compositional reservoir simulations and several approaches have been proposed to speed it up. Two recent approaches proposed in the literature are the shadow region method and the Compositional Space Adaptive Tabulation (CSAT) method. The shadow region method reduces the computation time mainly by skipping stability analysis for a large portion of compositions in the single phase region. In the two-phase region, a highly efficient Newton-Raphson algorithm can be employed with initial estimates from the previous step. The CSAT method saves computation time by replacing some of the phase split calculation in the two-phase region with pre-stored flash calculation results. The stored results can be used when the new feed composition is on one of the stored tie lines within a certain tolerance. The number of tie lines stored for comparison and the tolerance set for accepting the feed composition are the key parameters in this method since they will influence the simulation speed and the accuracy of simulation results. Inspired by CSAT, we proposed a Tieline Distance Based Approximation (TDBA) method to get approximate flash results in the two-phase region. The method uses the distance to a previous tieline in the same gridblock to decide whether the approximation should be made. Comparison between the shadow region approach and the approximation approach, including CSAT and TDBA, has been made by using a slimtube simulator where the simulation temperature and the simulation pressure are set constant. It is shown that TDBA can significantly improve the flash calculations in the two-phase region.