Aging Impact on Thermal Performance of the Aspen Wet Insulated Flowlines

Abstract

Wet insulation systems have been used in deepwater development projects in the petroleum industry for many years, with various successes and failures being observed. This paper presents a case study: the Aspen wet-insulated flowline systemthe original design and the thermal performance in early days, and now after 8 years in production.Using production flow rates from the daily reports, with temperature and pressure data provided by the subsea and topsides online monitoring sensors, OLGA simulations were performed to calculate the arrival temperatures at the host and compare them against the field gathered data. Additional simulations were subsequently performed to benchmark the model thermally and determine the effective overall heat transfer coefficient of the Aspen flowline systems. This information will help the industry to better understand the performance of an aged wet insulation system.