Transat Particles in Pipes
Transat Particles in Pipes
Transat Particles in Pipes
Applications
Ascomp Switzerland
1. Introduction
Multiphase flows appear in various industrial processes and in the petroleum industry in
particular, where oil, gas and water are often produced and transported together. The
complexity of multiphase flows in pipes increases with the presence of solid particles,
including sand and black powder in gas pipelines. Particle-induced corrosion in oil and gas
pipelines made from carbon steel occurs often, which requires the removal of pipe
segments affected incurring extra costs and break in the distribution. To this we can add the
catalytic reaction between the fluids and the pipe internal walls, including electrochemistry,
water chemistry. Black powder deposition may lead to the formation of particle slugs in the
pipes that can also be harmful to the operations. Further complexities may appear when
phase change between the fluids occurs like the formation of hydrates from methane and
light components of oil, which could be remedied through the injection of additives like
methanol, or hot water. TransAT Multiphase has a rich portfolio of models to cope with
particle laden flows: if the flow encompasses solid particles, the Eulerian-Lagrangian
formulation should be activated, including the granular formulation for packed systems.
where the mixture velocity, density and drift velocity are defined by:
= ; = ; = ; = (2)
These equations are solved for k phases present simultaneously in the system, sharing a
common pressure field pm, with a drift velocity uD and associated stresses in the momentum
equations prescribed algebraically between the phases, using:
( )
() + . () = + .
(4)
() + . (( )) = . D() (5)
Where D is the diffusivity and Ws is the water droplet settling velocity. As to the settling
velocity of sand particles, one could invoke Stokes Law relating the settling velocity of a
particle to its diameter, gravity, density and viscosity:
= = 2 18 (6)
In creaming oil-in-water emulsions, the Stokes velocity can be modified by introducing the
effect of steric hindrance due to the presence of particles e.g. (Barnea and Mizrahi, 1973):
(1)
= (7)
(1+13 )[5/3(1)]
where is the volume fraction. This model assumes that the cream layer contains a fixed
concentration of one phase dispersed in another and that the cream layer thickness
increases with time. As the model stands now, the effects of coalescence, flocculation,
electrostatic interactions, and droplet packing and deformation are not directly considered.
Figure 1: Settling of a dispersed phase into a Carrier phase by gravity using EEM.
= 0 (12)
() + () = + + + (13)
9
( ) = 2 ( [ ()]) +
2
(14)
= 1 + 0.152 3
where u is the velocity of the carrier phase, up is the velocity of the carrier phase at the
particle location, vp is the particle velocity, is the viscous stress and p the pressure.
Sources terms in Eq. (13) denote body forces, Fb, and the rate of momentum exchange per
volume between the fluid and particle phases, Ffp. The coupling between the fluid and the
particles is achieved by projecting the force acting on each particle onto the flow grid:
= =1
( , ) (15)
where stands for the particle index, Np for the total number of particles in the flow, f for
the force on a single particle centered at x, Rrc for the ratio between the actual number of
particles in the flow and the number of computational particles, and W for the projection
weight of the force onto the grid node xm, which is calculated based on the distance of the
particle from those nodes to which the particle force is attributed. Vm is the fluid volume
surrounding each grid node, and Vp is the volume of a single particle (Narayanan and
Lakehal, 2010). The model predicts well the deposition of particle in a turbulent channel
flow, as illustrated in Fig. 3.
(16)
( ) + ( ) = 0
( ) + ( ) =
(17)
+ + +
where f is the volume fraction of fluid (f p u is the velocity of the carrier phase, up is
the velocity of the carrier phase at the particle location, vp is the particle velocity, is the
sum of viscous stress and pressure p, is the turbulent stress tensor (depending whether
RANS, V-LES or LES is employed).
In this dense-particle context, the Lagrangian particle equation of motion (Eq. 14) should
have an additional source term Fcoll denoting the inter-particle stress force. The interphase
drag model in (Eq. 17) is set according to Gidaspow (1986). The particle volume fraction is
defined from the particle distribution function () as
= (18)
The inter-phase momentum transfer function per volume in the fluid momentum equation is
= [] ; (19)
with A standing for the particle acceleration due to aerodynamic drag (1st term in the RHS of
Eq. 17), i.e. excluding body forces and inter-particle stress forces (2nd and 3rd terms,
respectively). The pressure gradient induced force perceived by the solids is not accounted
for. The fluid-independent force Fcoll is made dependent on the gradient of the so-called
inter-particle stress, , using
= / (20)
Collisions between particles are estimated by the isotropic part of the inter-particle stress (its
off-diagonal elements are neglected.) In most of the models available in the literature is
modelled as a continuum stress (Harris & Crighton, 1994), viz.
The constant Ps has units of pressure, is the particle volume fraction at close packing, and
the constant is set according to Auzerais et al. (1988). The original expression by Harris &
Crighton (1994) was modified to remove the singularity at close pack by adding the
expression in the denominator (Snider, 2001); is a small number on the order of 10-7. Due
to the sharp increase of the collision pressure, near close packing, the collision force (Eq.
(20)) acts in a direction so as to push particles away from close packing. In practice the
particle volume fraction can locally exceed the close packing limit marginally.
Figure 4: Entrainment of solid particles in a channel flow using Granular Flow Model.
The model has been applied to simulate particle deposition and transport in gas pipeline,
where the concentration of the particle cloud is such that there is need to account for
particle-particle interaction, and the change of the apparent density and viscosity of the
carrier phase. The results are shown in Fig. 4.
3. Rheology Modelling
The rheology of hydrates has been included in TransAT via two models that consider an
apparent viscosity of the mixture: Ishii and Zuber (1979) (also revised by Ishii and
Mishima) and Colombel et al. (2009) more recent variant. In the first model, which is the
mostly used one, the apparent viscosity is defined using this expression:
2.5
= (1 ) (23)
where is the concentration for maximum packing, which for solid particles is equal to
4/7. For solid particles, *= 1, whereas for bubbles and droplets, it takes the form:
+0.4
= +
with 0 being the oil viscosity and M the maximum packing. The effective volume fraction
scales with the actual volume fraction ( water cut) as follows:
1
= 0 2 (25)
(1 )
4. Practical Applications
A 3D body-fitted grid was generated containing 500.000 cells well clustered near the pipe
wall. Two turbulence prediction strategies were employed: URANS and LES. The reason for
this comparison is to identify the predictive performance of the models in reproducing the
interaction between turbulence and the particles. The Lagrangian approach under one-way
coupling were employed to track the particles together with a particle-wall interaction model.
The Langevin model for particle dispersion was used for RANS (Lakehal, 2002). In the LES,
periodic boundary conditions along the pipe were employed to sustain turbulence; of course
the pipe was shortened in length compared to RANS (L = 2D).
The WALE sub-grid scale model has been used for the unresolved flow scales only (not for
particles). About 3000 droplets were injected, with a Gaussian size distribution around a
500 mean particle diameter, including: Range 1: 10 < Dp < 48m; Range 2: 49 < Dp <
85mRange 3: 86 < Dp < 123mRange 4: 124 <Dp < 16mRange 5: 162 <Dp <
200mSimulations run on a 64 Proc. parallel cluster using MPI protocol.
Figure 6: Snapshots of the flow in a pipe showing particle interaction with flow: left (LES); right (RANS).
The results depicted in Fig. 6 shows a clear difference between URANS and LES. While the
LES (left panel) depicts a clear turbulence dispersive effect on the particles, drifting some to
the wall region, the URANS results (right panel) deliver a steady path of the particles with the
mean flow. This is an important result, suggesting that albeit detailed 3D simulations, the
results are sensitive to turbulence modeling. The droplets population remaining in the gas
core has been thoroughly studied by Lecoeur et al. (2013), and plotted as a function of two
parameters (axial distance travelled in the pipe and the size of the droplets) for both RANS
and LES. The results obtained show important discrepancies between the two approaches: (i)
the droplet size has a more important effect in LES than in RANS: while in LES larger droplets
tend to deposit faster than the smaller ones due to their ballistic nature (free-flight
mechanism), in RANS, however, it seems that the smallest droplets do deposit faster than the
large ones.
It was also found that the RANS-predicted deposition rate of droplets is rather monotone (see
Fig. 8, black lines) and almost at equal rate or speed in the range 10-160 m; differences start
to be perceived for heavier droplets of diameter larger than 160 m(see Fig. 7, black line in
the 4th panel). The variation in the rate of droplet deposition is better depicted using LES,
since particles of different sizes react differently to the various resolved eddies.
Looking closely at Figure 7 reveals more details about to the rate of droplet deposition in the
pipe. The number of droplets remaining in the gas core is shown there as a function of the
axial distance travelled in the pipe, for all droplet-size ranges (10-48; 49-85; 86-123 and
162-200). Smaller droplets (Range 1) tend to deposit faster in RANS than in LES; a tendency
that changes gradually to Range 2 droplets that deposit equally be it with RANS or LES, to the
extreme situation where ballistic droplets (Range 3 & 4) deposit way faster in LES than in
RANS. Simply, LES is capable to distinguish between diffusional and free-flight deposition
mechanisms (Botto et al., 2005).
Figure 9: (left panel) velocity profiles, and (right panel) pressure drop in the pipe with wall roughness
gradient of 1.5, for a mass-loading of 1.0. : Exp. vs. TransAT
As seen in Fig. 8, as the simulation proceeds in time a particle tend to move towards the
bottom of the channel before re-suspension occurs thanks to the roughness model. The
results in Fig. 9 (upper panel) show excellent agreement between the fluid and particle
velocity profiles measured experimentally and that simulated by TransAT. The symmetry of
the particle profile (like the fluid one) reflects the perfect dispersion of the particles in the
channel, due to their systematic re-suspension caused by wall roughness. The lower panel of
Fig. 9 shows that the simulation accurately predicts the pressure drop along the channel (the
results are shown for a wall roughness gradient of 1.5 and a mass loading of 1).
Figure 10 shows the particle volume fractions, including comparison with the original data of
Snider (2001). The interface between clarified fluid and mixture at 0.1s and 0.15s matches
reasonably with Sniders (2001) data and with the analytical value of 0.25m and 0.19m from
the bottom. Figure 11 shows that at 0.15s particles reach close packing at the bottom of the
domain and at 0.2s no further settling has occurred. Figure 8 shows the particle distributions
during settling at four instants (0.1, 0.15, 0.185 and 0.2s). The present four-way coupling
solution, with the particle normal stress model as presented here and as implemented in
TransAT, gives a natural settling to close pack.
where K is a model constant equal to 0.23 based on SINTEF data and is the fluid viscosity.
The sand transport simulation is made here in two-dimensions with conditions given in
Danielson (2007). Particles with diameter of 250, 350 and 450 m are simulated for fluid
velocities of 0.78, 1.2 and 1.6m/s. The particle volume fraction at the inlet is 0.1. The channel
length is 0.3m and height is 0.01 m, and is covered by 12 cells in the cross flow direction.
The critical velocity predicted by Eq. (26) for a 3D pipe flow under these conditions is 4 m/s.
For the simulation with inlet velocity of 0.78 m/s (first panel in each set), a stable bed is
predicted with the fluid velocity at the top of the bed equilibrating to ~ 3m/s. Note that this is
lower than the correlation most probably due to the fact that in the channel case, there is less
wall friction (only at the bottom wall) than in a pipe. When the fluid velocity is increased (2nd
and 3rd panels in each set), it can be seen through the images that the bed height indeed
reduces such that the flow velocity at the top of the bed is again approximately 3m/s. Further
validation of the model for 3D pipes are necessary.
Figure 13: Particle distribution in the channel at 4 instants. Each set of panels refers to different inflow
conditions (upper panel: 0.78m/s, middle panel: 1.2m/s, and lower panel: 1.6m/s). The last two time
instants shows the formation of a stable particle bed for the lowest inflow velocity case.
Air
Water + sand
Figure 14: Geometry and grid for the air-water-sand case by reference to WASP facilty.
The experiments were performed at the Imperial College WASP facility with the test section
mounted horizontally. Gas and water mixed with sand were fed from two different entries
perpendicular to the main pipe (Fig. 14). Slugs were monitored from close to the point
where they were first initiated until they decayed or exited the pipe. Twin-wire holdup
probes were used to monitor the liquid level at various locations along the pipe. Slugs were
discriminated from large waves by measuring the velocity using cross correlation of the
outputs of successive probes (the waves travel at a lesser velocity that that of the mixture
and slugs travel at a velocity higher than that of the mixture). The length of the stainless
steel test section is 37 m and its diameter is 77.92 mm, the pressure at the outlet is 1atm,
and the temperature is 25C. Water and sand were introduced below a stratification plate at
the bottom of the test-line and gas is introduced above it, with well controlled superficial
velocities and void fraction. Use was made here of the IST technique to mesh the pipe. The
pipe CAD file was created using Rhinoceros software, and immersed into a Cartesian grid,
as shown in Figure 14. The 2D simulations were performed in a pipe of length 17m, while
the 3D ones were performed in a shorter domain of 8m, with 715.000 cells, then in a 16m
long one, consisting of 1.200.000 cells. Here we have combined the level set technique
separating the gas from the liquid with the EEM approach to predict the evolution and
settling of the sand in the pipe. The result of the simulation is shown in Fig. 15 below. The
sand fraction is shown in brown, the water and gas phases are clearly separated by the level
set technique, while the sand deposits and forms a sort of dune. Finally, it looks like the
sand has modified the flow to a shallow water structure.
Figure 15: Sand deposition in a stratified gas liquid flow: level set combined with EEM
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