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

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]