| In the past years, much effort has been dedicated towards predicting non-isothermal, transient, multi-phase flow through porous media for a number of practical applications. One of the major applications is the production of light/heavy crude oil, tar sands and extraction of residual oil from the oil-rich fields.; Thermal recovery process is one of the most popular and effective means of recovery. In order to design better thermal processes, it is essential to understand the mechanisms associated with non-isothermal, transient, multi-component and multi-phase flow through porous media. The key to success in solving these problems lies in developing a reliable mathematical model which, when used effectively through a numerical model, shall predict these processes much more accurately.; In the present work, a control-volume averaging method was used for conservation laws, to solve for a variety of multi-phase flow problems through a porous medium. The discrepancies in earlier analyses of researchers, some of whom used paradoxial approaches and made unusual assumptions, were tried to be done away with. The result is a versatile and logical generic numerical model which was tried successfully to predict a number of two-dimensional flows through a sand bed including: (1) Single-phase, non-condensing, (2) Two-phase, non-condensing, and (3) Three-phase, two-component, condensing flow.; Different injection temperatures and flow rates (based upon actual experiments) were used in analysing the performance of the model. Invariably, in all the above cases, the earlier predictions of other researchers were bettered or to the least, were matched vis-a-vis, after the current model was tuned appropriately. |
