Model Evaluation of Sand Transport Under Gas-Liquid Stratified Flow

Abstract

Abstract Sand transport in multiphase flow has recently gained particular attention of many companies in oil and gas industry owing to unpleasant circumstances that particle deposition accompanying. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of some existing models for the prediction of the critical sand deposition velocity under gas-liquid stratified flow against acquired experimental data. Experimental data are acquired under stratified flow regime with the air as gas phase, and the water as liquid phase. Spherical glass bead with three particle sizes of 70, 185 and 510 μm with concentrations less than 0.0045 vol/vol are utilized as solid phase. A horizontal 0.1 m ID test facility is designed and constructed in order to investigate the effects of parameters such as phase velocities, particle concentration and particle size on the critical sand deposition velocity. The acquired data are compared with previous models developed by Salama (1998), Stevenson and Thorpe (2002), Hill (2011), Ibarra et al. (2014) and Dabirian et al. (2017) to determine the most reliable model for the prediction of the critical sand deposition velocity. The experimental data show that depending on the particle size and concentration, the critical velocity can change either linearly or exponentially with particle concentration. The evaluation of the previous models with acquired experimental data confirm that Ibarra et al. (2014) and Dabirian et al. (2017) models generally show better performance for the predictions of the critical velocity. Models proposed by Salama (1998) and Hill (2011), respectively, under-predicts and over-predicts the critical velocities under various experimental conditions. Also, the comparison of Stevenson & Thorpe (2002) model and the experimental data corroborates that the model is not an accurate predictive tool for the critical velocity.