Abstract
Water-lubricated flow technology is an environmentally friendly and economically beneficial means of transporting unconventional viscous crudes. The current research was initiated to investigate an engineering model suitable to estimate the frictional pressure losses in water-lubricated pipelines as a function of design/operating parameters such as flow rates, water content, pipe size, and liquid properties. The available models were reviewed and critically assessed for this purpose. As the reliability of the existing models was not found to be satisfactory, a new two-parameter model was developed based on a phenomenological analysis of the dataset available in the open literature. The experimental conditions for these data included pipe sizes and oil viscosities in the ranges of 25–260 mm and 1220–26,500 mPa·s, respectively. A similar range of water equivalent Reynolds numbers corresponding to the investigated flow conditions was 103–106. The predictions of the new model agreed well with the experimental results. The respective values of the coefficient of determination (R2) and the root mean square error (RMSE) were 0.90 and 0.46. The current model is more refined, easy-to-use, and adaptable compared to other existing models.
Highlights
One of the most challenging aspects in the process value chain of unconventional oils is transporting the extracted oils economically to a central processing facility from different remote production sites [1,2]
The experiments were conducted in two high-quality research facilities: (1) Pipe Flow Technology Center, Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC), Saskatoon, SK, Canada; and (2) Process Systems Engineering Laboratory, Cranfield University (CU), Cranfield, UK
Equation (9) represents the proposed model of the current study. It should be used in conjunction with Equation (2) to estimate the frictional pressure losses in a water-assisted flow (WAF) pipeline
Summary
One of the most challenging aspects in the process value chain of unconventional oils is transporting the extracted oils economically to a central processing facility from different remote production sites [1,2]. The more viscous oil is separated from the pipe wall with less viscous water by forming an annular flow pattern while flowing through a pipeline [3,4,5]. This flow system does not require any chemical-intensive expensive process for reducing the oil viscosity. The frictional pressure losses for the LPF were found to be comparable to that of transporting only water under similar process conditions This flow technology has a proven capacity of significantly reducing the pump power for transporting unconventional viscous oils
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