PhD scholarship in Compositional Reservoir Simulation Involving Complex Phase Equilibria

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Silviu Marinescu
One PhD scholarship in Compositional Reservoir Simulation Involving Complex Phase Equilibria is available at Center for Energy Resources Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (CERE DTU).

The project
The project which is sponsored by international oil companies, deals with the accuracy of thermodynamic models, and reliability and efficiency of phase equilibrium calculation algorithms in compositional reservoir simulations involving complex phase equilibria.

The project consists of two topics: one on “Advanced Thermodynamic Models for Reservoir Simulation of Reservoir Processes with Multiphase Equilibrium”, and another on “Stability Analysis Skipping for Multiphase Compositional Reservoir Simulation”. The project can be expanded in the future in terms of topics and man power under the same theme on composition simulation involving complex phase equilibria, provided that additional funding becomes available.

The scope
The scope of the project covers complex reservoir processes, such as production of heavy oil with steam and solvent, enhanced oil recovery with CO2, and development of liquid rich shale (LRS) reservoirs. All these processes involve multiphase equilibrium, which adds some challenges to reservoir simulations in terms of phase equilibrium description and calculation. We plan to investigate how different thermodynamic descriptions will influence the simulation results and how important it is to employ a more accurate thermodynamic model for the complex multiphase equilibrium.

Different thermodynamic models will be tested with special focus on several advanced thermodynamic models which are believed to be better in describing multiphase equilibrium. We also plan to improve the computational efficiency for reservoir simulations with rigorous description of multiphase equilibrium, where the time used in phase equilibrium calculation is expected to increase dramatically, especially in its stability analysis part. It will be investigated how to bypass stability analysis in the above mentioned multiphase equilibrium scenarios in an efficient and reliable manner. For LRS, a particular issue regarding the influence of capillary pressure on phase equilibrium will be evaluated.