Fluid Dynamics & Aerodynamics

Biography

Biography: E Z Massoud

Abstract

In subsea oil and gas production system, the hydrocarbons from the reservoirs are transferred as multiphase mixture of oil, gas, water, sand, salt, H₂S, CO₂ and other unwanted products. Slug flow is one of the important and complex multiphase flow regime encountered in oil and gas production systems. The slugging problems may cause flooding of downstream processing facilities, severe pipe corrosion and structural instability of pipeline and further induce the reservoir flow oscillations and a poor reservoir management. In the present study, computational fluid dynamics simulation is used to investigate two phase slug flow in vertical subsea oil and gas production system pipelines using the volume of fluid (VOF) methodology implemented in the commercial code ANSYS Fluent. The viscous, inertial and interfacial forces have significant effect on the hydrodynamic characteristics of two-phase slug flow. These forces are investigated by introducing a wide range of inverse viscosity number, N_f; Eotvos number, Eo and the Froude number, Fr; in the present study. The simulation accounts for the hydrodynamic features of two phase slug flow including the shape of Taylor bubble, volume fraction distribution, slug frequency and velocity and thickness of the falling film. The increase in Taylor bubble rising velocity in inertia dominated flows causes an increase in the velocity of fully developed falling liquid film. The CFD simulation results are in good agreement with previous experimental data and models available in literature.