During the design phases of a Deep Offshore field development, a major issue in Flow Assurance is the prevention of Hydrates formation in the flowlines and risers. After designing the system, numerous multiphase flow and transient cool-down simulations are required, to account for different situations corresponding to several input parameters.
This paper shows how to build efficiently Response Surfaces Models (RSM), which are simple mathematical models, accurately describing the critical time of hydrate formation, as a function of the input parameters, over a wide range of variation covering their variability. The obtained RSM can provide useful information for several applications such as sensitivity studies, in order to exhibit the most important input parameters, to reduce the calculation number, or to take into account uncertainty in the parameters.
