An analysis of the unified formulation for the equilibrium problem of compositional multiphase mixtures

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct a thorough mathematical analysis of the unified formulation advocated by Lauser et al. [Adv. Water Res. 34 (2011) 957–966] for compositional multiphase flows in porous media. The interest of this formulation lies in its potential to automatically handle the appearance and disappearance of phases. However, its practical implementation turned out to be not always robust for realistic fugacity laws associated with cubic equations of state, as shown by Ben Gharbia and Flauraud [Oil Gas Sci. Technol. 74 (2019) 43]. By focusing on the subproblem of phase equilibrium, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of the corresponding system of equations. We trace back the difficulty of cubic laws to a deficiency of the Gibbs functions that comes into play due to the ``unifying’’ feature of the new formulation. We propose a partial remedy for this problem by extending the domain of definition of these functions in a natural way. Besides, we highlight the crucial but seemingly unknown fact that the unified formulation encapsulates all the properties known to physicists on phase equilibrium, such as the tangent plane criterion and the minimization of the Gibbs energy of the mixture.