A numerical investigation on the heat flow in the process of oil-water displacement in SDPSO

摘要

Spar Drilling Production Storage and Offloading (SDPSO) is a new type of deep ocean platform developed in recent years. The process of oil-water displacement is used for oil storage and offloading and the research on the accompanying heat flow has been significant. The wax precipitation and solidification at low temperature will particularly affect the flowing of oil in the displacement process. When the heat flow is concerned, numerical simulation requires large computation. It is necessary to develop an efficient numerical method for this calculation. As a kind of interface tracking method, the volume of fluid (VOF) method needs less computing resources compared with other multiphase numerical methods. As for thermal expressions, there are mainly two kinds of governing equations, i.e. temperature equation and enthalpy equation, and two kinds of interpolation scheme of heat conductivity, i.e. algebraic interpolation scheme and harmonic interpolation scheme. There is a need to find out which combination of governing equation and interpolation scheme of heat conductivity would result in a better precision for the heat flow. Therefore, four non-isothermal solvers, corresponding to the four combinations, are established. After comparison with an analytical solution, it is found that the temperature equation together with the harmonic interpolation scheme of heat conductivity results in better precision.