Abstract
Abstract The industry push towards compact, subsea gas-liquid separators has been pronounced in recent years. There are, however, associated risks in decreasing the size of separators. In particular, if the hydrocarbon liquid is supersaturated with gas and requires significant time to evolve, the liquid residence times inside the compact separator may be insufficient to allow the gas to completely evolve out of solution. The yet-to-evolve gas will continue in the exiting liquid stream and present itself as free gas further downstream. Excess amounts of free gas can seriously affect the reliability and performance of downstream equipment. The rate of gas evolution from flowing crude oil must be quantified to address this concern. Toward this end, an experimental program has been initiated in which the effects of pressure, temperature, fluid properties, and shear on gas evolution rate are evaluated in a 1 liter pressure vessel. The initial experiments will be conducted with air in water, with the intention of ultimately performing experiments on model and crude oils. Different agitation rates will be tested at pressures up to 200 psia. The data generated will be used to evaluate if a database of similar tests with crude oils and gas are required to properly size compact gas-liquid separators in order to decrease the likelihood of gas carry-under events. This work will provide novel insight regarding gas evolution rates for oil dominated systems at high pressures in the presence of shear.
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