REAL-TIME SIMULATION OF MULTI-PHASE

COUNTER-CURRENT FLOWS IN GAS-LIFTED WELLS

Marco Bonizzia, Alberto Dilullob and Michele Margaronec
a

TEA Sistemi SPA,Via Livinallongo 3, Milano 20139. Email: marco.bonizzi@teagroup.com

b
ENI E&P Email: Alberto.DiLullo@eni.com
c
ENI E&P Email: Michele.Margarone@eni.com

ABSTRACT
In the exploitation of Oil/Gas fields it is common practice to transport the produced
multiphase mixture with a single pipeline from the well to the off/on-shore receiving
facilities. The hydraulic design of these pipelines and the related flow assurance studies
are based on the use of commercial codes which, in some cases, are also able to describe
transient flow conditions (start-up, shut-down, etc.). The present work involved MAST, a
new transient one-dimensional multi-phase flow simulator under development. As
explained in [1], the code is based on a novel methodology which allows direct prediction
of the spatial-temporal evolution of the flow patterns in the line. Hence, transitions from
one flow regime to another are dynamically captured by the simulator. The code deals
with oil, water and gas characterized by PVT studies and include a heat-conduction
model suitable for well completions involving flow both in the tubing and in the annuli.
These features have been applied, in the present work, for a typical gas-lift application,
where gas is injected into the wells tubing to boost oil production. The gas is injected
through the annulus and flows counter-currently with respect to the produces fluids. The
heat transfer interactions between the two streams determine the oil temperature after the
well choke. The numerical simulations are conducted with a MAST version developed to
run on a GPU graphic card, as explained in [2]. It will be shown that the MAST code
describes the thermo-fluid dynamics interactions accurately and potentially might be
exploited in real-time.

1. INTRODUCTION
Transient one-dimensional multi-phase flow simulators are nowadays typically used by flow
assurance engineers for the optimum design of multi-phase flow lines. Relevant phenomena
which can potentially take place in a line, such as water accumulation, liquid surges, hilly
terrain effects, possible formation of partial blockages due to either hydro or thermo dynamics
effects (hydrates, wax, sand, etc.) and the effect of complex fluids (emulsions, dispersed
solids), must be simulated by such tools with adequate accuracy of the obtained results. From
an operational view point, it would also be desirable that these simulators could be used for
real-time monitoring studies, in order to conduct diagnostics analysis of the production flow
line. Certainly the most diffused code worldwide is OLGA [3], which typically allows the
petroleum engineers to obtain some results in relatively low computing execution times. The
code can detect transient phenomena such as that related to the formation of terrain-induced
and severe slugging. Nonetheless the code is not predictive on hydrodynamic slugging. When
the OLGA code is employed for real-time monitoring, some significant simplifications of the

underlying modelling methodology are made, which hinder the code from capturing the
resulting multi-phase physics with adequate accuracy. Given the overall picture, ENI E&P
and TEA Sistemi Spa decided jointly to develop a transient one-dimensional multi-phase flow
simulator called MAST (Multiphase Analysis and Simulation of flow pattern Transitions).
The code typically adopts much finer mesh points (mesh size of the order of the pipe
diameter) than those required by OLGA and integrates the conservation equations of the
multi-field model using small time steps. It has been shown [1] that the simulator is capable to
predict the dynamic evolution of multi-phase flow patterns without the need to depend on
flow regime maps. Hence transition from stratified to slug, bubbly or annular flow is
automatically predicted as result of the numerical integration process. Since fine meshes are
used by MAST, the computing time to terminate a simulation tends to be fairly large. For
instance, the serial CPU version of the code would approximately take some hours to simulate
gas-liquid flow in a 10km long line with a 12 internal diameter and for an integration time of
ten thousands seconds. Effort was then put into the code speed-up, and it was eventually
decided to re-design the whole source code for GPU computing using Nvidia CUDA, as it is
shown in [2]. Use of GPU helps to massively boost execution times, because of the parallel
threads resources that are available in the graphic card. Using the most powerful GPUs
available in the market (Nvidia Tesla C1060 and the new Fermi C2050) a two-order of
magnitude speed-up was achieved using CUDA, making the MAST code suitable also for real
time applications. In what follows, the mathematical/modelling framework will be illustrated
with emphasis on the coupling between multi-phase flow dynamics and heat conduction
across the tubing insulation layers, and an example in using the MAST-CUDA code for the
real-time simulation of gas lifted wells will be given.

2. MATHEMATICAL AND NUMERICAL MODELLING FRAMEWORK

MAST adopts a multi-field approach mathematical modelling, whereby separate sets of
equations are written for the fields flowing in the tube. The present work focuses on a gasliquid two-phase flow; hence four will be the relevant fields: gas and liquid continuous and
dispersed fields. Let L, l, d, G, g and eb denote the volume fractions of total liquid,
continuous and dispersed liquid, total gas, continuous and dispersed gas respectively. The
following relations then hold:

L l d ; G g b; L G 1

(1)

Neglecting for sake of simplicity the slip between the continuous and dispersed fields, the
total number of equations that need to be solved are 8: two momentum equations, four
continuity equations, one pressure and mixture temperature equations. The equations for the
conservation of momentum are solved for sub-layers 1 and 2, which are composed by liquid
continuous + gas dispersed and gas continuous + liquid dispersed respectively. Defining the
volume fractions and mixture densities of the layers as

l l b g
g g d l
; 2 g d ; 2
l b
g d
the momentum equations can then be written as:
1 l b ; 1

(2)

1 1u1 1 1u12
P
h

1
1 1 g cos 1 1 g sin
t
z
z
z
w1 S wp1 i S i

e u1 d u 2 e u 2 deu1 l b u1
A
A
L G

(3)

2 2 u 2 2 2 u 22
P
h

2
2 2 g cos 2 2 g sin
t
z
z
z
w2 S wp2 i S i
g d

e u1 d u 2 e u 2 deu1
u 2
A
A
G L

(4)

The notation in these equations is: z and t are the spatial and temporal coordinates,
subscriptsand denote field 1and field 2 denotes the volume fraction, u is the velocity, g
is the gravity acceleration, P is the interfacial pressure, h the liquid height, is the shear
stress, the density, A is the pipe area, is the pipe inclination with respect to the horizontal,
Swp1 , Swp2 and Si denote the perimeter wetted by layer 1, the perimeter wetted by layer 2, and
the interfacial width respectively, w1, w2 and i denote wall shear stress of layer 1, 2 and
interfacial shear respectively. The source terms edeed and denote bubble
entrainment and disengagement rates, and droplet entrainment and deposition rates and term
due to condensation/evaporation of the phases respectively. The source terms, together with
the shear stresses, require closure laws. The mass conservations solved are those of dispersed
gas and liquid fields and total gas and liquid as shown below.
d l d l u d

e d d
t
z
L

(5)

b g b g u b

e de b
t
z
G

(6)

L l l l ul d l u d

t
z
z

(7)

G g
t

g g u g
z

b g u b
z

(8)

The pressure equation is obtained by summing equations (7)-(8) dividing each continuity
equation by its respective density.
1
1 l l u l d l u d 1 g g u g b g u b G g L l
1

l z
z
z
z
l t

g
g t
g l
(9)

The energy equation is written in its primitive form as follows:

G g H g L l H l G g u g H g L l ul H l P Q
t
z
t

(10)

In equation (10) Hg and Hl denote the gas and liquid enthalpy respectively, while Q denotes
the heat power either absorbed or released by the bulk fluid, which can be expressed as:
Q hconv T fluid Twall,inner A

(11)

In the above equations hconv, Tfluid, Twall,inner and A denote the forced convection heat transfer
coefficient, the bulk fluid temperature, the inner piping wall temperature and the relevant
surface area across which the heat flux propagates. In order to compute the heat flux across
the inner pipe wall, the wall surface temperature must be known. This is calculated from the
solution of the heat conduction equation, which, in effect, implies the use of a finite elements
approach in order to solve the temperature at each radial position along the tubing walls for
each fluid cell of the computational mesh. In its most general form the equation can be written
as follows:

T
T
k
S
t x x

(12)

The heat conduction module accounts for four different thermal boundary conditions:

Fluid boundary this boundary applies to tubing walls externally bounded by a fluid
which can be either flowing or still;

Soil boundary this boundary shall apply to buried pipelines, whereby the user
specify the burial depth and the type of fluid in contact with the soil surface;

Hydro boundary this shall apply to a fluid cell of the computational mesh where the
governing multi-phase flow equations are solved;

Fixed boundary this boundary shall apply if the heat conduction is not solved and an
overall heat-transfer coefficient between the bulk fluid and outer environment
temperatures is given.

After having selected the relevant thermal boundary conditions that apply to the problem
under investigation, the heat structures are subsequently characterized by a left and right
thermal boundary condition (which physically reflect what bounds the two extremities of the
heat structure) and by the thermal properties of all the walls which compose the structure. The
adopted heat conduction model is extremely flexible, allowing also for the solution of the heat
conduction across heat structures which are bounded by either side by fluid cells (with hydro
thermal condition on both left and right boundary). This will be better described in the section
where the results of the code related to gas-lifted wells will be illustrated.The governing
equations are numerically discretised in a staggered grid arrangement, with the adopted
integration schemes being the first order Euler backwards scheme (fully explicit) for
integration over time and the first order upwind for integration of the convective terms. The
adoption of the explicit scheme allows easier parallelization. The time step is limited by the
flow Courant number:
C

umax t
1
z

(13)

In the above equation C, umax, t and z denote the Courant number, the maximum phase
velocity, the time step size and the mesh spacing respectively. Since the set of model
equations is hyperbolic, the boundary conditions have to be prescribed by the characteristics
velocity in and out of the flow. In summary, the methodology solves the following equations:
1. Momentum equation of layer 1 equation (3) [explicitly integrated]
2. Momentum equation of layer 2 equation (4) [explicitly integrated]
3. Continuity equation of liquid dispersed (droplet) field equation (5) [explicitly
integrated]
4. Continuity equation of gas dispersed (bubbles) field equation (6) [explicitly
integrated]
5. Continuity equation of total liquid phase equation (7) [explicitly integrated]
6. Continuity equation of total gas phase equation (8) [explicitly integrated]
7. The pressure equation derived equation (9) [implicitly integrated]
8. The heat conduction equation (12) [explicitly integrated]
9. Energy equation (10) [explicitly integrated]
The code has been entirely parallelized and re-designed for GPU (Graphics Processing Units)
computing application [2], which permits significant speed-up (up to two orders of
magnitude), compared to the serial CPU version, as shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1. Ratio of CPU to GPU computing times for benchmark test case
(machine with Nvidia Tesla C1060 graphic card and Intel Xeon
processor E5405@2GHz, Win7 OS 64bit.)

The attained speed-ups, besides massively minimizing the code execution times, allow MAST
to be used for real-monitoring studies as the next section will show.

3. GAS-LIFTED WELL CASE STUDY

The case under investigation deals with counter-current multi-phase flow in gas-lifted wells.
The hydrocarbon fluid flows in the pipeline tubing, while the gas lift flows counter-currently
through an annulus gap. A sketch of the line is given in Fig. 2 where one can also appreciate
the two resulting heat structures that characterize the problem; while one (of type A),
corresponding to the wall thickness between tubing and annulus, has the same thermal
boundary conditions of type hydro at either sides, the other (of type B), corresponding to
the wall thickness between annulus and the external environment, has a left thermal boundary

of type hydro at the left wall and one of type fixed (because the overall heat transfer
coefficient is explicitly prescribed with no need to solve the heat conduction equation) at the
right wall.

Figure 2. Sketch of tubing and annulus for gas-lifted well application.

Hence the heat conduction will be only solved for the fluid cells bounded by heat structures
A. Fig. 2 also indicates that the wall between tubing and annulus does not have a constant
thickness. In fact, for the bottom part of the gas-lifted well, the wall is made of a 7.72mm
thick steel layer, while for the upper part of the well the wall is made of a 3mm thick Teflon
layer and a 7.72mm thick steel layer respectively. The diameters indicated in Fig. 2 are
detailed in Table 1, while the actual line altimetry is shown in Fig. 2, where the X and Y
coordinates are displayed (please note that the scale is slightly enlarged in order to appreciate

Table 1. Gas-lifted well geometry.

Diameter
D1
D2
D3
D4
D5

Dimension [m]
0.11826
0.13198
0.12426
0.2224
0.23012

the distinction between tubing and annulus. The figure also indicates the modelling approach
adopted to carry out the simulation with MAST; in particular, since at present the code does
not cater for a full network model, the line is simulated as a single branch composed by two
sub-lines, the first being the annulus gap across which the gas is flowing and the second being
the tubing with hydrocarbon fluid and the gas lift, with mass sources inject at the inlet of the
branch and at the intersection between annulus and tubing where the hydrocarbon coming
from the production well mixes with the gas. The total length of the line is approximately
1515m.

Figure 3. Schematic of the branch modelling adopted to conduct the

simulations with MAST.

Table 2 shows the thermal boundary conditions and the characteristics of the walls (OHTC
stands for overall heat transfer coefficient) which apply to the heat structures resulting from
the branch modelling as from Fig. 3

Table 2. Heat structures and thermal boundary conditions

Heast
Structures
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Wall
OHTC
OHTC
OHTC
OHTC
OHTC
OHTC
Steel (7.72)[mm]
Steel (7.72)[mm]
Teflon,Steel
(3,7.72)[mm,mm]
Teflon,Steel
(3,7.72)[mm,mm]
Teflon,Steel
(3,7.72)[mm,mm]
OHTC

Left Thermal
boundary
Pipe 1 (hydro)
Pipe 2 (hydro)
Pipe 3 (hydro)
Pipe 4 (hydro)
Pipe 5 (hydro)
Pipe 6 (hydro)
Pipe 7 (hydro)
Pipe 8 (hydro)
Pipe 9 (hydro)

Right Thermal Boundary

Pipe 10 (hydro)

Pipe 3 (hydro)

Pipe 11 (hydro)

Pipe 2 (hydro)

Pipe 12 (hydro)

U=4 [W/(m2K)],T=2oC

U=4 [W/(m2K)],T=2oC
U=15 [W/(m2K)],T=5oC
U=15 [W/(m2K)],T=10oC
U=15 [W/(m2K)],T=17oC
U=15 [W/(m2K)],T=22oC
U=15 [W/(m2K)],T=27oC
Pipe 6 (hydro)
Pipe 5 (hydro)
Pipe 4 (hydro)

From the table it is evident that the heat conduction equation is solely solved for pipes 7-11,
as for all others fixed overall heat transfer coefficients and outer temperatures are prescribed.
The boundary conditions which apply to the problem under investigation are a fixed gas mass
flow rate of 2.23kg/s and fixed inlet bulk temperature of 13oC at the branch inlet (pipe 1), a
fixed hydrocarbon source flow rate of 15.9kg/s at the intersection point between pipes 6 and 7
(please refer to Fig. 3) injected at 25oC, and a prescribed line outlet pressure of 35bar.
Two computational meshes are studied, the first having 2048 nodes and the second 4096;
assuming an average pipe internal diameter of around 0.12m, the respective mesh spacing is
of 6 and 3 pipe diameters. The selected Courant numbers for the two runs are of 0.1 and 0.15
for the mesh of 2048 and 4096 nodes respectively while the prescribed integration time is
10000 seconds, which is deemed to be sufficient for reaching a steady-state for both fluid and
thermo dynamics. The MAST code is run on a PC powered with Nvidia Tesla C1060 graphic
card and with the Intel Xeon E5405@2GHz processor; for each selected grid, two simulations
are separately conducted, the first running on the GPU and the second forced to run on the
CPU only. Insignificant differences (<1% for the most relevant flow variables) between the
coarser and finer mesh generate, regardless of whether the simulation is conducted on the
CPU or the GPU. Discrepancies around a few percent were obtained between the CPU and
GPU computations, as figure 4, which refers to the pressure profile along the line and the
overall heat transfer coefficient plotted against depth shows.

Figure 4. Comparison between CPU and GPU computations for pressure

profile and overall heat transfer coefficient along the whole simulated
branch (nodes with 4096 control volumes).

Figure 5 shows the attained temperature profile along the branch for the GPU run using 4096
nodes, a very similar trend is obtained from the CPU simulation. It can be seen how the gas
flowing through the annulus gap is heated up by both the neighbouring soil and the warmer
fluid flowing along the tubing. The temperature trend on the gas lift side follows different
slopes according to the relevant heat structures; in particular, the last part of the annulus sees
the highest temperature gradient, which is due to the scarce thermal insulation of the tubing
(for depths comprised between ~-450m and ~-620m there is only steel, while for depths
greater than ~-450m there is also a Teflon layer which helps better insulate the fluids). As it
should owing to the counter-current flow, while the gas, which enters the line at a lower
temperature compared to the hydrocarbon, heats up in the annulus the fluid in the tubing cools
down.

Figure 5. Temperature profile along simulated branch (GPU simulation with

computational mesh made of 4096 nodes).

The resulting flow pattern along the tubing is mainly stratified/annular flow, as the liquid
volume fraction profile along the branch as shown in figure 6 helps clarify.

Figure 6. Liquid holdup profile along simulated branch (GPU simulation with
computational mesh made of 4096 nodes).

It is interesting to check out some radial temperature profiles at positions where the insulation
layers are different: figure 7 shows the temperatures for depths of -565m and -180m, where
the walls are made by Steel and Teflon+Steel respectively. As the figure highlights, there is a
steep gradient across the Teflon layer, while it is much smoother for the steel layer as it
should taking into account that at attained steady-state the heat fluxes are constant, and to
compensate a much lower thermal conductivity (as is the case for Teflon) the temperature
drop across the given layer must be higher.

Figure 7. Radial temperature profiles for depths of -560m (left panel) and 180m (right panel) where insulation layers are made of steel and
Teflon+steel respectively (GPU simulation with computational mesh
made of 4096 nodes).

Table 3 shows the GPU and CPU computing for the simulations and the real time ratio, which
is defined as the ratio of the CPU/GPU execution time to integration time.
Table 3. CPU, GPU computing times and Real-Time Ratios.
Nodes [-]

2048
2048
4096
4096

CPU [s]

NA
41440
NA
115750

GPU [s]

3264
NA
4607
NA

RealTime
Ratio
.33
4.14
.46
11.5

As table 3 shows, only the GPU can guarantee a successful real-time simulation of the
problem under investigation; figure 8 further highlights this aspect, by plotting the CPU and
GPU performances against number of nodes.

Figure 8. Real-time ratios for CPU and GPU computations.

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4. CONCLUSIONS
The present paper describes the real-time simulation capabilities of the one-dimensional
transient multi-phase flow simulator MAST when the computation executes on the GPU,
rather than the CPU, of the PC by using the Nvidia CUDA abstraction language. The selected
case study concerns the simulation of multi-phase flow in counter-current gas-lifted wells.
The heat conduction module that has been implemented in MAST indeed permits the
interaction of one heat structure with two fluid cells, enabling a full coupling between the
under lying fluid dynamics and the flow thermal behaviour. It has been shown that the GPU
computations are fully reliable and totally outperform the CPU runs as far as the code speedup is concerned, showing that the GPU version of the MAST code is the best choice to carry
out real-time monitoring studies.

REFERENCES
1.

Bonizzi, M., Andreussi, P. & Banerjee, S. (2009). Flow regime independent, high
resolution multi-field modelling of near-horizontal gas-liquid flows in pipelines, Int.
J. Multiphase Flow, 35, 3446.

2.

Andreussi, P., Bonizzi, M. and Dilullo, A., (2011). Advanced design of hydrocarbon
transportation pipelines. 10th Offshore Mediterranean Conference and Exhibition, 2325 March, Ravenna, Italy.

3.

Bendiksen, K., Malnes, D., Moe, R. and Nuland, S. (1991). The dynamic two-fluid
model OLGA: Theory and Application. SPE Paper 19451 171-180.

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