Visualization of Terrain-induced Slugging in W-shaped Pipeline

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jungho Lee ◽  
Jaebum Park ◽  
Sangho Sohn

Gas-liquid two-phase flow in a circular pipeline is commonly encountered in an inclined pipeline of an offshore plant. To visualize gas-liquid flow phenomena in an inclined pipeline, the w-shaped transparent pipeline was fabricated with internal diameter of 2″ and slope angle of 25°. The terrain-induced slug flow in a steady-state was visualized at fixed water flow rate of 1 m3/hr and 80% GVF (Gas Volume Fraction). The air and water flow is initially maintained in stratified or wavy flow at t = 0 s. When the velocity difference between the air and water is high enough, the Kelvin-Helmholtz wave motion starts to occur just after at t = 0 s. As the wave reaches the top, the upward water flow is faced with the downward water flow in the main visualized region. When the airway is clogged, the air slug is formed at t = 0.02 s. When a huge tidal wave is observed at t = 0.1 s due to different velocity between the upward water and the downward water flow, the air slug travels at a greater velocity than the water flow. As the tidal wave enlarges its growth, the chaotic motion with scattered bubbles is exhibited at the gas-liquid interface. A series of the air slugging is periodically observed after near 0.5 s. At the second v-shaped pipeline, the slugging phenomena become even more severe due to an irregular water inflow from the first v-shaped pipeline.

Author(s):  
Liang Chang ◽  
Qiang Xu ◽  
Chenyu Yang ◽  
Xiaobin Su ◽  
Xuemei Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Gas entrainment may cause pressurization deterioration and even failure of pumps under conditions of high inlet gas volume fraction (GVF). When the inlet GVF increases to a critical value, an obvious deterioration performance of pump occurs. Air-water pressurization performance and inlet critical GVFs of a centrifugal multiphase pump are investigated experimentally under different inlet pressures and gas-liquid flow rates. To determine the first and second critical GVFs, a new method is proposed by computing the local extreme points of the second derivative of performance curves. New prediction correlations for two critical GVFs are established with relative errors lower than ±10% and ±8%. Boundaries of three different flow patterns and the transition flow rates are determined and presented by critical GVFs on the flow pattern diagram. Moreover, boundaries of maximum pressurization are determined by performance curve clusters and a power function correlation of gas-liquid flow rates when reaching the maximum pressurization is established. With the increase of inlet pressure from 1MPa to 5MPa, two-phase pressurization performance is significantly increased; occurrences of pressurization deterioration are obviously delayed with the first and second critical GVFs increasing by maximums of 8.2% and 7.1%.


Author(s):  
Afshin Goharzadeh ◽  
Keegan Fernandes

This paper presents an experimental investigation on a modified airlift pump. Experiments were undertaken as a function of air-water flow rate for two submergence ratios (ε=0.58 and 0.74), and two different riser geometries (i) straight pipe with a constant inner diameter of 19 mm and (ii) enlarged pipe with a sudden expanded diameter of 19 to 32 mm. These transparent vertical pipes, of 1 m length, were submerged in a transparent rectangular tank (0.45×0.45×1.1 m3). The compressed air was injected into the vertical pipe to lift the water from the reservoir. The flow map regime is established for both configurations and compared with previous studies. The two phase air-water flow structure at the expansion region is experimentally characterized. Pipeline geometry is found to have a significant influence on the output water flow rate. Using high speed photography and electrical conductivity probes, new flow regimes, such as “slug to churn” and “annular to churn” flow, are observed and their influence on the output water flow rate and efficiency are discussed. These experimental results provide fundamental insights into the physics of modified airlift pump.


2018 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Salameh ◽  
Y. Zurigat ◽  
A. Badran ◽  
C. Ghenai ◽  
M. El Haj Assad ◽  
...  

This paper presents three-dimensional numerical simulation results of the effect of surface tension on two-phase flow over unglazed collector covered with a wire screen. The homogenous model is used to simulate the flow with and without the effect of porous material of wire screen and surface tension. The Eulerian-Eulerian multiphase flow approach was used in this study. The phases are completely stratified, the interphase is well defined (free surface flow), and interphase transfer rate is very large. The liquid–solid interface, gas–liquid interface, and the volume fraction for both phases were considered as boundaries for this model. The results show that the use of porous material of wire screen will reduce the velocity of water flow and help the water flow to distribute evenly over unglazed plate collector. The possibility of forming any hot spot region on the surface was reduced. The water velocity with the effect of surface tension was found higher than the one without this effect, due to the extra momentum source added by surface tension in longitudinal direction. The use of porous material of wires assures an evenly distribution flow velocity over the inclined plate, therefore helps a net enhancement of heat transfer mechanism for unglazed solar water collector application.


Author(s):  
Naoki Matsushita ◽  
Akinori Furukawa ◽  
Kusuo Okuma ◽  
Satoshi Watanabe

A tandem arrangement of double rotating cascades and single diffuser cascade, proposed as a centrifugal pump with high performance in air-water two-phase flow condition, yields lower head due to the smallness of the impeller outlet in comparison with a impeller with large outlet diameter and no diffuser. Influences of impeller diameter change and installation of diffuser blades on two-phase flow performance were experimentally investigated under the case of the same volute casing. As the result, the similarity law of the diameter of impeller having the similar blade geometry and the rotational speed is satisfied even in two-phase flow condition. Comparing pump performances between a large impeller without diffuser blades and a small one with diffuser blades, higher two-phase flow performance is obtained by controlling the rotational speed of a small impeller with diffuser blades in the range of small water flow rates, while a large impeller with no diffuser gives high performance in the range of high water flow rate and small air flow rate.


2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 608
Author(s):  
Jie Yi ◽  
Huilin Xing ◽  
Tianwei Sun ◽  
Victor Rudolph

The production of coal seam gas initially requires pumping and removing significant amounts of water to sufficiently reduce the hydrostatic pressure in the subsurface, so that methane can desorb from the matrix and diffuse into the cleat systems; majority of the methane molecules gather into nucleation or bubbles. During the depression, the flow pattern of gas in cleats changes from bubble flow to slug flow, and finally forms circular flow. The significance of the bubble flow process—during which the liquid phase is continuous while the gas phase exists as small bubbles randomly distributed within the liquid—has not been emphasised because of its complexity. In this study, a free energy based two-phase lattice Boltzmann model is used to simulate the gas bubble/water flow behaviour in micro-cleats of a coal seam gas reservoir. The model was validated by comparison with analytical results based on dimensionless numbers, and good agreement was found in general. The influences of bubble shape, bubble size, and coal surface wettability on gas water two-phase flow in micro-cleats are discussed. The simulation results indicate that the bubble size and wettability of gas have significant impacts on the flow capacity of both gas and water. A decrease of the water flow rate is observed when large bubbles occur, and the gas flow rate decreases when the gas wettability becomes stronger. The bubble flow process significantly influences the drainage of water and the further gas production.


2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Renato P. Coutinho ◽  
Paulo J. Waltrich ◽  
Wesley C. Williams ◽  
Parviz Mehdizadeh ◽  
Stuart Scott ◽  
...  

Abstract Liquid-assisted gas-lift (LAGL) is a recently developed concept to unload wells using a gas–liquid fluid mixture. The success deployment of the LAGL technology is related to the behavior of two-phase flow through gas-lift valves. For this reason, this work presents an experimental and numerical study on two-phase flow through orifice gas-lift valves used in liquid-assisted gas-lift unloading. To the knowledge of the authors, there is no investigation in the literature on experimental characterization of two-phase flow through gas-lift valves. Experimental data are presented for methane-water flow through gas-lift valves with different orifice port sizes: 12.7 and 17.5 mm. The experiments were performed for pressures ranging from 1.00 to 9.00 MPa, gas flow rates from 0 to 4.71 m3/h, and water flow rate from 0 to 0.68 m3/min. The experimental results are compared to numerical models published in the literature for two-phase flow through restrictions and to commercial multiphase flow simulators. It is observed that some models developed for two-phase flow through restrictions could successfully characterize two-phase flow thorough gas-lift valves with errors lower than 10%. However, it is first necessary to experimentally determine the discharge coefficient (CD) for each gas-lift valve. The commercial flow simulators showed a similar performance as the models available in the literature.


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