A numerical simulation of water distribution associated with internal corrosion induced by water wetting in upward inclined oil pipes

Abstract

Internal corrosion of pipeline is often observed at the pipe bottom, especially at the pipe elbow, which may bring great threat to personnel safety and cause serious environmental pollution once the pipeline perforation happens. The pipe wall will get thinned by corrosion when it is wetted by produced water dissolved with various corrosive media. Therefore, it is essential to predict the water distribution in pipelines and determine the continuous phase that wets the pipe wall when analyzing the internal corrosion of crude oil pipelines. This paper aims to study key parameters, such as water cut, mixture velocity, oil viscosity and inclination angle of pipes, that dominate water distribution and the phase that wets the wall of pipe bottom by applying computational fluid dynamics. The results of numerical simulation are proved to coincide well with the available experimental results.