EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF DENSITY, VISCOSITY AND SURFACE TENSION ON TWO-PHASE FLOW IN HORIZONTAL PIPES

Two phase gas/liquid flow in pipes is common occurrence in the petroleum, chemical, nuclear and geothermal industry. In the petroleum industry, it is encountered in the production, transportation and processing of hydrocarbon from oil and gas field. In designing these systems, accurate prediction of pressure drop is imperative which is determine from flow pattern and flow regime map. Unfortunately, most of the flow regime maps were developed for air-water system and widely used for the oil/gas system. In spite of the practical importance the general applicability of these maps is not addressed. In order to improve generality of flow regime maps it is necessary to evaluate the effect of density (density of water 62.4 lb/cu.ft and for oil 50 lb/cu.ft), viscosity (viscosity of water 1 centipoise and for oil 10 centipoise at standard condition) and surface tension which differ by great magnitude (air/water = 72 dyne/cm and gas/oil = 35 dyne/cm) on flow regime map. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the effect of density, viscosity and surface tension on the flow regime map and address its application. Researchers have conducted studies in the area of gas-liquid flow in horizontal pipes. A number of flow regime maps have been developed. Such studies include those done by Baker, Govier & Aziz, Mandhane, Beggs & Brill, etc. Further, to formulate the flow regime maps, some mapping parameters and dimensionless groups are used as coordinates. Some of the parameters are liquid and gas superficial velocities, mass flux, gas liquid properties (density, viscosity, etc.) and dimensionless numbers such as liquid velocity number, gas velocity number, Weber number, and Froude numbers. To generalize the applicability of the flow regime maps, combination of parameters and dimensionless number are used. To generate these maps lots of experimental data is required and usually it is not feasible to evaluate the effect of each individual parameter (density, viscosity, surface tension, pipe size or geometry) on the flow regime map. The multi-phase flow is characterized by the existence of interfaces between the phases and discontinuities of associated properties. Surface tension is utilized to characterize the existence of an interphase and this effect was not evaluated for the air-water system despite the fact that most of the studies reported in the literature consider air-water system to generate the experimental data required for flow regime map. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of density, viscosity and surface tension on flow regimes in horizontal pipe. To evaluate the effect of density, viscosity and surface tension experiments would be carried out at different values of density, viscosity and surface tension. The experimental data will be utilized to generate flow pattern map and artificial intelligence technique will be use to predict the effect of these properties on the variation in the boundaries of different flow patterns.