Modeling viscosity of methane,nitrogen,and hydrocarbon gas mixtures at ultra-high pressures and temperatures using group method of data handling and gene expression programming techniques

Accurate gas viscosity determination is an important issue in the oil and gas industries.Experimental approaches for gas viscosity measurement are timeconsuming,expensive and hardly possible at high pressures and high temperatures(HPHT).In this study,a number of correlations were developed to estimate gas viscosity by the use of group method of data handling(GMDH)type neural network and gene expression programming(GEP)techniques using a large data set containing more than 3000 experimental data points for methane,nitrogen,and hydrocarbon gas mixtures.It is worth mentioning that unlike many of viscosity correlations,the proposed ones in this study could compute gas viscosity at pressures ranging between 34 and 172 MPa and temperatures between 310 and 1300 K.Also,a comparison was performed between the results of these established models and the results of ten wellknown models reported in the literature.Average absolute relative errors of GMDH models were obtained 4.23%,0.64%,and 0.61%for hydrocarbon gas mixtures,methane,and nitrogen,respectively.In addition,graphical analyses indicate that the GMDH can predict gas viscosity with higher accuracy than GEP at HPHT conditions.Also,using leverage technique,valid,suspected and outlier data points were determined.Finally,trends of gas viscosity models at different conditions were evaluated.

A novel Shan and Chen type Lattice Boltzmann two phase method to study the capillary pressure curves of an oil water pair in a porous media

In this study,an immiscible oil-water two phase flow in a typical porous media was modeled using the well-known Lattice Boltzmann method.A set of flow tests for modeling an oil-water two phase flow in the porous media were conducted to generate the capillary pressure curves for two distinctive initial conditions,namely,water and oil dispersed conditions in two domains of different resolutions.Based on the obtained results,the general trend of these curves has an acceptable agreement with the usual trend of these curves in hydrocarbon reservoirs and the capillary data are independent of the initial conditions.Also,the results showed the effect of grid resolution on capillary data which are validated quantitatively by proposing a new approach using Purcell's equation.One can see that they are compatible with the geometrical characteristics of the porous media as well as the conditions governing the tests.Finally,another set of tests for oil water pairs of higher viscosity ratio up to 4.4 was performed in a low porosity heterogeneous porous media and the viscous coupling effect on capillary data,due to viscosity ratio,was studied to strengthen the model validation.