Investigation Of Oil Water Concurrent Flow In Horizontal Pipelines

Abstract

Pressure loss in an oil water concurrent flow in pipelines represents a big challenge in the design and operation of crude oil pipelines. Pumping capacity and pipeline operation cost is directly affected by the pressure gradient along the pipeline. This loss is influenced by different parameters such as the line size; water cut (concentration), oil viscosity, etc. These losses have attracted number of researchers who investigated the flow type from different aspects, mostly at small scale (laboratory). However in this work, the oil water flow in horizontal pipeline is investigated at the full scale pipeline dimensions (152.4mm diameter and 50 km long) and actual fluid properties using the capabilities of the OLGA software. The actual operational parameters records used to build and validate the computational model. The objective the study is to investigate the factors influencing the pressure loss along the pipeline and how their influence. Impact of different parameters in the flow pressure drop along the pipeline is evaluated and compared against the previous studies and published literature. It is found that pressure drop in an oil water concurrent flow in horizontal pipeline is increasing with increase of flow rate, reducing of water content and reducing of pipe diameter while the inlet temperature has limited effect on improving flow ability to limited distance with no effect on the overall pressure gradient.