Dataset of flow experiment: Effects of density, viscosity and surface tension on flow regimes and pressure drop of two-phase flow in horizontal pipes

Abstract

The dataset associate with the report is the flow experiment data acquired to evaluate the effect of density, viscosity, and surface tension on flow regime and pressure drop of two-phase flow in a horizontal pipe. To collect the data, experiments were conducted using a horizontal flow loop of 9.15 m (30 ft.) pipe length and 0.0254 m (1 inch) pipe diameter with a two-phase air/liquid system. The effect of surface tension was introduced by varying surface tension using the surfactant solution, the viscosity was varied using glycerin, and density was varied by the addition of calcium bromide. The superficial velocity of the liquid ranges from 0 to 3.048 m/sec (0–10 ft/s) and superficial gas velocity ranges from 0 to 18.288 m/sec (0–60 ft/s) respectively.The flow experiments were conducted at a constant liquid flow rate (fixing liquid rate) and varying the gas rate from minimum to the maximum value in a step-wise manner and then reducing the gas rate from maximum to minimum to see the presence of hysteresis effect. At each step of the experiment, the steady-state condition was observed based on the flow rate and pressure response and data were gather to have sufficient data points. Also, the video of the flow pattern was recorded using a high-speed camera for flow regime identification. Numerous sets of experiments were conducted to capture the ranges of superficial liquid and superficial gas velocity, density (1–1.5 gm/cc), viscosity (1–3.1 cP), and surface tension (32–70 mN/m).The data was used to develop the flow-regime map for the different cases and the effect of density, viscosity, and surface tension on flow regime and pressure drop were evaluated based on the boundary transition between different flow regimes. The pressure contour maps were generated to correlate with the flow regime map and their boundary transition. Also, a comparison of the generated data with the models in the literature is presented.Knowledge of flow regime type is essential for accurate prediction of the pressure drop in multiphase flow. However, to generate these maps a large quantity of experimental data is required and it is not feasible to evaluate the effect of each parameter on the flow regime map and boundary transition. This data-set is important in addressing the effect of fluid properties on two-phase horizontal flow also it will be a potential data-set for comparison as well as the development of multiphase flow modeling.