Effect of wall roughness in turbulent pipe flow of a pseudoplastic crude oil: An evaluation of pipeline field data

Abstract

An equation for estimating the thickness of the laminar sublayer in turbulent pipe flow of pseudoplastic fluids was developed. This equation was used to classify the turbulent pipe flow into two regions: smooth wall and rough wall turbulence. The roughness Reynold number was used to determine the smooth wall turbulence and rough wall turbulence regions. To verify the validity of the present analysis, the developed equations were used to quantify the effect of wall roughness of the Hungarian Alygo pipeline on pressure loss calculations. Excellent agreement was obtained between the friction factors calculated from the correlations of Clapp (1961) and Szilas et al. (1981), and the field data of the Hungarian Algyo pipeline.