Integrated Modeling of Reservoir Fluid Properties and Multiphase Flow in Offshore Production Systems

The book is intended for practicing engineers in the oil industry, researchers, and graduate students interested in designing and simulating offshore hydrocarbon production systems. It approaches offshore oil production systems from an integrated perspective that combines the modeling of thermophysical properties of reservoir fluids and their flow as a multiphase mixture in wellbores, flow lines, and risers.

The first part of the book presents an internally consistent method to compute the critical parameters and acentric factor of Single Carbon Number (SCN) fractions of petroleum mixtures using state-of-the-art multivariate fitting techniques. The procedure is illustrated and validated using flash and differential liberation data from actual field samples.

In the second part of the book, mechanistic multiphase flow models are discussed in light of their ability to predict the pressure, temperature, and phase holdup of production fluids in wellbores, flow lines, and risers. Multivariate fitting procedures are again applied to evaluate the sensitivity of the results with respect to closure relationship parameters, such as slug body gas holdup, wall shear stress, and wall roughness in pipelines and production tubing. Finally, the modeling framework is validated using actual field data from offshore production wells.

Tobias R. Gessner graduated in Mechanical Engineering (2006) from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), with a master’s degree (2010) and a doctorate (2021) from the same institution. He has been working at Petrobras as a flow assurance engineer since 2008, where he provides technical support in multiphase flow simulations for new offshore oil and gas projects, as well as for production monitoring in mature fields. His main interests are mechanistic models of gas-liquid flows, characterization of PVT samples, and compositional modeling of petroleum reservoir fluids.

Jader Barbosa Jr. holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering (1995) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering (1997) from COPPE/UFRJ, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London, UK (2001). He is a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UFSC, where he conducts research in engineering and thermal sciences. His areas of specialization include mixture thermodynamics and physical properties, phase change, multiphase flows, enhanced heat transfer, and not-in-kind cooling technologies.

Dr. Barbosa was awarded the Dudley Newitt Prize (2001) for his exceptional doctoral work by Imperial College. In 2004, he received the Young Scientist Award from the EUROTHERM Committee. During his time at UFSC, he has served as an advisor or co-advisor for 17 doctoral theses and 35 master’s theses. Six of these theses have received the ABCM-Embraer and CAPES Thesis Awards.