Abstract
In offshore Malaysia, T-junction is installed at the production header as a compact separator to tap produced gas from reservoir as fuel gas for power generation. However, excessive liquid carryover in T-junction presents a serious operational issue because it trips the whole production platform. The primary objective of present study is to numerically investigate the liquid carryover due to formation of slug, subsequently its liquid carryover at different diameter ratio. The analyses were carried out on a model with 0.0254 m (1 inch) diameter horizontal main arm and a vertically upward side arm using Volume of Fluid Method. Three different sides to main arm diameter ratio of 1.0, 0.5 and 0.3 were investigated with different gas and liquid superficial velocities. The results showed that, while the general trend is true that smaller diameter ratio T-junction has lesser liquid take off capacity, it has a very high frequency of low liquid carryover threshold. In other words, under slug flow, smaller diameter ratio T-junction is constantly transporting liquid even though at a lesser volume in comparison to regular T-junction.
Highlights
T-junction is an appendage of small diameter pipe, which is attached to the main pipe to tap the fluid source from the main stream
This T-junction configuration is often seen in the offshore production platform where the T-junction is used to tap gas directly from the production header
The objective of the present paper is to investigate the effect of T-junction’s diameter ratio on liquid carryover, when the inlet flow regime is slug flow
Summary
T-junction is an appendage of small diameter pipe, which is attached to the main pipe to tap the fluid source from the main stream. This T-junction configuration is often seen in the offshore production platform where the T-junction is used to tap gas directly from the production header. Liquid carryover is a frequent problem that occurs in a T-junction whereby an excessive amount of liquid is take off into the gas stream and channeled into downstream equipment which is not designed to handle liquid. Platform trips and production has to halt to drain out the excessive liquid.
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