Acceleration of the NVT Flash Calculation for Multicomponent Mixtures Using Deep Neural Network Models

Phase equilibrium calculation, also known as flash calculation, has been extensively applied in petroleum engineering, not only as a standalone application for a separation process but also as an integral component of compositional reservoir simulation. Previous research devoted numerous efforts to improve the accuracy of phase equilibrium calculations, which place more importance on safety than speed. However, the equation-of-state-based flash calculation consumes an enormous amount of computational time in compositional simulation and thus becomes a bottleneck to the broad application of compositional simulators. Therefore, it is of vital importance to accelerate flash calculation without much compromise in accuracy and reliability, turning it into an active research topic in the past two decades. With the rapid development of computational techniques, machine learning brings another wave of technology innovation. As a subfield of machine learning, the deep neural network becomes a promising computation...