IMPLICIT TREATMENT OF COMPOSITIONAL FLOW

Abstract

In basin modeling the thermodynamics of a multicomponent multiphase fluid flux are computationally too expensive when derived from a cubic equation of state and the Gibbs equality constraints. In this article we present an alternative implicit molar mass formulation technique using binary mixture thermodynamics. The two proposed solution methods are based on a hybrid smoother, Gauss-Seidel-Galerkin at each time-step with analytical computation of the derivatives. The new algorithm overcomes the difficulty of choosing an optimal relaxation parameter and reduce significantly the numerical effort for the computation of the molar masses. Numerical results are presented which show significant improvements with respect to previous methods.