A direct Eulerian GRP scheme for the prediction of gas-liquid two-phase flow in HTHP transient wells

A coupled system model of partial differential equations is presented in this paper, which concerns the variation of the pressure and temperature, velocity, and density at different times and depths in high temperature-high pressure (HTHP) gas-liquid two-phase flow wells. A new dimensional splitting technique with Eulerian generalized riemann problem (GRP) scheme is applied to solve this set of conservation equations, where Riemann invariants are introduced as the main ingredient to resolve the generalized Riemann problem. The basic data of "X well" (HTHP well), 7100 m deep, located in Southwest China, is used for the case history calculations. Curve graphs of pressures and temperatures along the depth of the well are plotted at different times. The comparison with the results of Lax Friedrichs (LxF) method shows that the calculating results are more fitting to the values of real measurement and the new method is of high accuracy. © 2013 Jiuping Xu et al.