Investigation of pressure and temperature gradient in four-phase flow in a complex horizontal pipeline

Odan, Mohamed Abdalla (2021) Investigation of pressure and temperature gradient in four-phase flow in a complex horizontal pipeline. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (3MB)

Abstract

The oil and gas (O&G) industry uses multi-phase and multi-component pipeline flows to move product from one site to another or to different areas within the same site. In extreme environments, such as offshore or the Arctic, the development of four-phase flows in a complex pipeline can bring even more challenges to the project. Jumpers and bends need to be able to is to withstand pressure drops and hydrodynamic loads from internal multi-phase flows and the current, respectively. The study outlines the development of an experiment to investigate of pressure and temperature gradients in four-phase flows in a complex pipeline. Due to the excessive temperatures and pressures of the oil transport pipeline system, the main pipes include shorter pipes (bends and jumpers) that are attached to the manifold at the pipeline. These shorter pipes are used to enable expandability and prevent system failure. The present work examines the practicality of applying a system of four-phase, four-fluid flows for transporting a multi-phase flow (sand, water, gas, and oil) along a flow loop horizontal pipeline with many multiple bends and jumpers. This experimental set-up can be used for investigating a wide variety of multi-phase flow problems considered in the this research. As a means to precisely measure and predict the characteristics of thermo- and hydro-dynamic multi-component mixtures, models representing the multi-phase behavior and equilibrium phase are created and tested. Additionally, the study looks at heat transfer, mass, and momentum in both the flow and the pipeline walls, and offers equations to describe their interrelationships. Another focus of this research is to obtain a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) investigation of multi-phase flow phenomena in order to characterize the impact of pressure gradients and flow regimes due to various types of phase flow techniques used in the petroleum industry and in horizontal pipelines. The results of this thesis offer fundamental and practical guidance for the analysis and design of flow loop pipeline multi-phase flow systems and devices incorporating four-phase flows (sand, water, gas, and oil) through a flow loop pipeline. The novel results were obtained with carefully controlled flow loop pipeline and volume fractions, which show a significant impact on temperature and pressure drops. Dimensionless numbers in fluid mechanics and pressure drop results show good agreement with the experimental data. Further, the experimental and modeling approach of this thesis makes a unique contribution to the O&G field and to the design of transport pipelines for processing four-phase flows that include bends and jumpers.

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