CFD MODELLING OF PRESSURE DROP ALONG AN INCLINED OIL-WATER FLOW SYSTEM

Abstract

With the increasing need to ensure an optimized production in various processes, especially transportation in the oil and gas industry, the accurate understanding of the dynamics of multiphase flow and its effect on the pressure drop along a flow string is becoming pertinent. The achievement of efficient equipment design such as pumps, separators, flow lines and other production equipment depends on a good prediction of the pressure drop alongtheflowsystem. It is also crucial to understand how changes in fluid properties, flow conditions and pipe geometric properties affect pressure which is an important parameter that is often encountered in the oil and gas industry. Extensive works on oil-water flow mixture have been carried out by numerous investigators considering the horizontal and vertical orientations. Reliance on the empirical correlations and models developed by these investigators to model in pipeline design can be somewhat found wanting because of limitations imposed by the reality of hilly terrains encountered during transportation of oil-water mixture. In this work, experimental data from studies carried out by Hanafizadehet al. [1] was used as the data source. The pipe geometric properties, mixture velocity, oil and water properties and conditions from the above-mentioned studies were used as inputs to the ANSYS FLUENT software to develop a model for pressure drop along with an inclined oil-water flow system. Results obtained from the CFD modelling were in close agreement with the experimental result of Hanafizadehet al.