Numerical simulation of two phase flow in wellbores by means of drift flux model and pressure based method

This paper presents a drift flux correlation and a pressure based method to overcome convergence problems of two phase flow simulation in wellbores. The drift flux correlation is flow pattern independent so that results discontinuities at flow pattern transitions are eliminated. Using the experiment data of large diameter annuli, the performance of drift flux correlation has been testified. The proposed pressure based method combines iteration and traversal to ensure convergence of the algorithm in which the staggered grid finite volume method and the fully implicit backward Euler method are adopted for the spatial discretization and time integration schemes. Test case comparison with Roe solver has proved the good performance of proposed pressure based method. Moreover, a full scale experiment is conducted to demonstrate the successful implementation of the pressure based method and drift flux correlation.