Fractional flow formulation for three-phase non-isothermal flow in porous media

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the simulation of three-phase non-isothermal compressible flow in porous media taking into account capillary effects. We propose a new formulation of the considered non-isothermal problem in which the gradients of capillary pressure functions are eliminated from the pressure and temperature equations by the introduction of a change of variables for the pressure. The mentioned change of variables is referred to as the global pressure. A computational algorithm for the numerical implementation of the problem using the finite difference method is proposed. A priori estimate for the solution of the difference problem is obtained. The results of numerical experiments on the example of a one-dimensional problem are presented.