Simulations of Axial Mixing of Liquids in a Long Horizontal Pipe for Industrial Applications

Abstract

Various industrial applications require the use of common pipelines or tubing to simultaneously or sequentially deliver multiple types of liquids. Dependent upon the application, long pipelines or tubing can range from several meters to several kilometers in length, composed of significant horizontal and vertical sections. Axial mixing is an important aspect of such flows of liquids in succession from a safety and reliability point of view. It is anticipated that mixing is due to turbulence and buoyancy, with the latter as a result of density differences of the mixing fluids. This paper sets out a numerical simulation model based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to fundamentally understand the mixing behavior of two miscible fluids under actual industrial-project-specific conditions. To benchmark its accuracy, the simulation model is first verified with respect to its numerical parameters using a short, 10 m pipe. Subsequently, a 100 m horizontal pipe is modeled, and we show that these results can be...