Investigation of erosion behavior of particle-fluid flow in offshore platform T-pipes

Abstract

The process of viscous oil exploitation is often accompanied by small sand particles, which harms safety production and causing consequences such as erosion. T-shaped pipes are widely used in offshore platform, and its flow protection is very important for the safe operation. This work aims to investigate the particle trajectory and erosion ratio rule in viscous oil transportation by simulation, experiment and support vector machine (SVM) model. The sensitivity analysis and the orthogonal method results demonstrate that the erosion ratio (ER) of T-pipes is proportional to the water content, gas content and sand content. And the erosion ratio (ER) of T-pipes is inversely proportional to the viscosity. The water content has the greatest effect on the pressure drop (Δp). The viscosity value around 326.79 mPa s can significantly reduce the erosion ratio while maintaining a low-pressure drop. Meanwhile, SVM model is used to calculate the erosion ratio (ER) with the mean squared error (MSE) being 4.25 × 10−6 in the training set and 0.0002 in the test set. The most severe erosion area is located in the downstream branch symmetrically. The erosion mechanisms are impact deformation and sliding, that dominate the erosion distributions.