Title: Isothermal and non-isothermal multiphase flow steady-state simulation of offshore production systems using ALFAsim

Authors: Juan Eliseo Prado Rojas; Franciani Goedert; Antonio Marinho Barbosa Neto; Marcus Vinícius Canhoto Alves

Addresses: Department of Petroleum Engineering, Santa Catarina State University, Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, 88.336-275, Brazil; Department of Chemical Engineering, Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Jordan, Cochabamba, Bolivia ' Department of Petroleum Engineering, Santa Catarina State University, Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, 88.336-275, Brazil ' Department of Petroleum Engineering, Santa Catarina State University, Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, 88.336-275, Brazil ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Santa Catarina State University, Joinville, Santa Catarina, 89.219-710, Brazil

Abstract: This paper presents ALFAsim, a new commercial software tool for the simulation of transient and steady-state multiphase flows in tubes and pipelines. The main goal of this work is to show that ALFAsim's one-dimensional multiphase flow simulator models can reproduce accurately an offshore production system with isothermal and non-isothermal study cases in steady state condition considering field data extracted from the literature. The difference when simulating a case when temperature effects are present is investigated and different parameters like hold-up, void fraction and phase velocities are analysed. A discussion about these effects linking them to observations in the open literature. The software is tested with field data from the open literature and the results obtained with ALFAsim are within ±15% deviation range. [Received: July 5, 2021; Accepted: October 9, 2021]

Keywords: multiphase flow; heat transfer; steady state simulation; oil and gas production systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2022.124419

International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology, 2022 Vol.30 No.4, pp.335 - 358

Received: 01 Jul 2021
Accepted: 09 Oct 2021
Published online: 26 Jul 2022 *

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