Numerical simulation of flow of multicomponent mixtures in porous media

Abstract

A study is made of the isothermal flow of multicomponent mixtures in a porous medium, accompanied by phase transitions, interphase mass exchange, and change in the physicochemical properties of the phases [1–3], It is assumed that at each point of the flow region, phase equilibrium is established instantaneously and the flow velocities of the separate phases conform to Darcy's law. Approximate solutions of problems of displacing oil by high-pressure gas were obtained in [1]. By generalizing the theory developed in [4], a study is made in [5] of the structure of the exact solutions of the problems of the flow of three-component systems which describe the displacement of oil by different reactants (gases, solvents, micellar solutions). The numerical solutions of the problems of multicomponent system flow are considered in [2, 3, 6, 7]. This paper presents a numerical method which is distinguished from the well-known ones [2, 3, 6, 7] by the following characteristics. The flow equations are approximated by a completely conservative finite-difference scheme of the implicit pressure-explicit saturation type, the calculation being carried out using Newton's method of iteraction with spect to both the pressure and the composition of the mixture. The minimum derivative principle [8] is used in the approximation of the divergence terms of the equations. The phase equilibrium is calculated using the equation of state.