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ISSN Online: 2379-1748

ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-483-0

ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-482-3

4th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference
April, 14–17, 2019 , Las Vegas, NV, USA

Study of pressure-drop in two phase flow based on experiment and CFD simulation

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 673-677
DOI: 10.1615/TFEC2019.emt.027492

Abstract

Measuring the pressure change in borehole is useful to predict the production and makes it easier to design the downstream equipment such as separator or electric dehydrator.
The pressure change in the vertical tube is a summation of three factors: friction and liquid-gas interface, gravity, acceleration changing. Average void fraction is widely used to predict the gravitation pressure gradient terms. The acceleration term is negligible in homogeneous flow model.
For the friction term scholars had already done a large amount of experiments because it was the main reason contributing to total pressure-drop. There are two models to calculate this term: one is homogeneous flow model and another is separated flow model. Some of the approaches are introduced in this paper like Lockhart-Martinelli approach (1949) [1], Muller-Steinhagen and Heck correlation (1986) [2]. With literature review, the existing databases for vertical upward flow always use the tube diameter nearly 25mm and the range of superficial liquid velocity is nearly 4m/s. In our paper we choose to use different and larger diameters tube to have a trial comparison. The water and air flow velocities range from 0.01 to 20 m/s and 0.05 to 2 m/s, separately. With different combination of these two phases we could get all kinds of flow regime described by Govier and Aziz (1972) [3], Hewitt (1969) [4], Delhaye (1994) [5].
In this paper, we introduce an experimental system to simulate gas-liquid two-phase flow in wellbore.