Application of Higher-Order Methods in Compositional Simulation

A third-order differencing scheme is described and compared with several alternative methods commonly used to discretize the convection term of the component conservation equations of compositional simulators. This method can be used at higher cell Peclet numbers than those used with other common convective differencing schemes, resulting in a substantial saving in computation time for the same accuracy Comparisons are made with analytical solutions and with 2D and 3D simulation results for single-point upstream weighting, two-point upstream weighting, and Chaudhari's method.