Oil and Gas Applications

Pipeline and valve Erosion Modeling

At various stages in the production process, material must be piped across long distances with large parts of the pipeline being very difficult to access. Consequently, any failures are very expensive to fix. Here, STAR-CD was used to simulate the erosion characteristics in a pipe and choke valve enabling the system engineers to design out potential failure points.

Multiphase Pipe Flow

STAR-CD was used to simulate the multiphase flow (kerosene and water) through pipelines to look at droplet size distributions. Experimental data was used to validate the performance of the S-gamma model used.

STAR-CD’s Eulerian two-phase model was used. The results demonstrated that turbulence in the bulk flow caused the droplets to break up.

Settling of water drops (heavier phase) as observed in experiments... (maximum volume fraction 15 %, compared to the mean of 6.2 %).

Smaller droplets are near wall because turbulence breaks them their more intensively than in the center.

Droplet size distribution at pipe exit: measurement is done at pipe center (mid) and one location above and below.

Initial droplet size in experiments not known – still good agreement...