화학공학소재연구정보센터
Chemical Engineering Communications, Vol.203, No.9, 1131-1138, 2016
A Simple Model for Predicting the Two-Phase Heavy Crude Oil Horizontal Flow with Low Gas Fraction
A two-phase heavy crude oil flow with low gas fraction is common in the oil transportation process. However, most of the studies of a gas-liquid flow are based on low viscosity fluid, such as water and light oil; as a result, the results cannot be introduced successfully into the mixture flow of gas and heavy crude oil. In this work, a two-phase flow of gas and heavy crude oil, which originated from the Bo-hai oilfield in China, was investigated in a horizontal pipe with 47-mm inner diameter. Data were acquired for the oil flow rate ranging from 2m(3)/h to 10m(3)/h, the input gas volume fraction ranging from 0.01 to 0.15, and the viscosity of crude oil ranging from 2.41Pas to 0.34Pas. Based on the drift-flux model, a new simplified correlation was developed to predict the void fraction and the pressure gradient. A comparison between the predicted and measured data demonstrates a reasonable agreement, and the correlation might be helpful for practical application in industry, especially in initially estimating the flow characteristic parameters.