Two-Phase Annular Flow in Vertical Pipes

Annular flow happens to be one of the flow patterns encountered in multiphase flows. In two-phase (liquid/gas) annular flow, the gas phase flows partly as a film along the pipe wall and partly as droplets entrained in the gas phase (core). Two-phase (liquid/gas) flow in vertical pipes is very common in industrial applications such as power plants, nuclear reactors, boilers, gas well exploration and so on. Several industrial problems can be solved by analyzing them as two-phase annular flow. One of the problems usually encountered in the gas well exploration industries is liquid loading. This is a two-phase phenomenon where, the energy needed to transport the liquid droplets out of the gas well is insufficient and as such causes the liquid to accumulate at the bottom of the gas well. This problem, when allowed to prolong, might kill the gas well and cease production. Included in this work is a comprehensive literature review on liquid loading experiments and theoretical analyses in an attempt to curb the problems associated with liquid loading. The present work aims at adopting computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques to model the liquid film to predict the onset of liquid loading in a vertical pipe by using ANSYS Fluent commercial code. This will provide an in-depth of the mechanisms that take place at the liquid loading condition.