The optimum operation of the surface production system is one of the key elements needed for the successful operation of natural gas well facilities, particularly for gas stripper well facilities. Liquids, especially water, are the major culprits of excessive losses, not only in the wellbore but throughout the surface production system. Oversimplified models that consider the network system as a single phase can lead to incorrect pressure drop values because these models do not account for the condensed water along the pipes. This work will focus primarily on developing, testing, deploying and demonstrating a unique, analytical tool that is currently not available in the natural gas industry, and that will serve the primary purpose of increasing throughput capacity and improving operational reliability of natural gas gathering network infrastructures by tracking the development of a two-phase flow in the network system. The Finite Volume Method (FVM) on a staggered grid has been chosen to solve the set of four, two-fluid conservation equations for two-phase flow derived from the governing inviscid flow Euler PDE equations. Numerical solution is obtained at each control volume using the Globally Convergent Newton-Raphson technique.
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