Development of gas-oil-water flow models and corrosion/erosion plugins for the multiphase and flow assurance simulator ALFAsim™

Client: Petrogal Brasil | Partner: ESSS

Petrogal Brasil invests in Research and Development projects in the Flow Assurance area to learn more about the challenges that it will possibly face during the development of the fields in which it either operates or is a concessionaire, both in Brazil and in the world. One of these previous projects was the development of a new transient multiphase flow and flow assurance simulator, that intends to improve the modelling of several challenging phenomena encountered in production and injection oil and gas system. Such simulator is being continuously  developed by the ESSS team and is called ALFAsim, an acronym for Artificial Lift and Flow Assurance Simulator. ALFAsim, in its design, provides a base module that will have a robust numerical simulation core, where the main hydrodynamic and thermodynamic equations will be solved, and a flexible architecture that allows the inclusion of specific models for the simulation of flow assurance problems, including deposition of paraffins or formation of hydrates.

In this project, ESSS and ISDB worked in partnership to research and develop the following topics in order to improve ALFAsim capabilities. 

1) Research and development of gas-oil-water flows models for high pressure transport pipes using new conceptive and a new thorough experimental dataset (Multiflow);

2) Development of special internal corrosion (CO2 and H2S) and erosion (solids and droplets) modules in the form of plugins;

3) Improvements in the thermal modeling of buried pipelines;

4) Adaptation for the simulation of CO2-rich oil production pipelines due to its importance to brazilian pre-salt fields.