Numerical investigation on the migration of leaked pollutants after liquid pressurized pipeline leakage regarding oil and gas parallel pipelines situation

Abstract

Buried parallel pipelines may cause environmental pollution and explosive accidents after leakage due to corrosion, third-party damage or other factors. Here, an actual oil pipeline in-situ is employed as a prototype to establish a two-dimensional incompressible leakage and diffusion model. The model was applied to analyze the effects of different parameters including pipe diameters, burial depths and flat spacing to other pipelines on the diffusion distance of spilled diesel fuel in porous media. The results show that the existence of natural gas pipeline can change both of the polluted shape and the distance range. The natural gas pipeline can effectively inhibit the diffusion range of diesel with the increase of pipe diameter and the decrease of buried depth. A smaller spacing between parallel transmission pipelines, also results in a reduced horizontal diffusion rang. Meanwhile, the dimensionless formulas are fitted based on the Π theorem regarding diesel diffusion range versus diameter of gas pipeline, buried depth, and spacing between parallel pipelines. This study can develop appropriate protocols for detecting and recovering contaminants from paralleling pipeline.