Experimental investigation of oil–water flow in the horizontal and vertical sections of a continuous transportation pipe

Abstract

A series of experiments were conducted to investigate flow pattern transitions and concentration distribution during simultaneous pipe flow of oil–water two-phase flow through the horizontal and vertical sections. The flowing media applied were white mineral oil and distilled water. Superficial oil and water velocities were between 0 and 0.57 m/s. Flow pattern maps revealed that the horizontal and vertical sections of the pipe lead to different flow pattern characteristics under the same flow conditions. The original contributions of this work are that a transition mechanism for predicting the boundary between oil-in-water (O/W) flow and water-in-oil (W/O) in oil–water two-phase flow was obtained. The effects of input water cut, oil and water superficial velocities on the concentration distribution of the dispersed phase were studied. The empirical formulas for the phase holdup based on the drift-flux model were obtained. The predicted results agreed well with those of the experimental data, especially for the O/W flow pattern.

Classification of Oil-Gas-Water Three-Phase Flow in a Pipeline Based on BP Neural Network Analysis

“…The data used in the following analysis come from experiments reported in the literature [8]. The experiments were carried out by using an oil-water-gas three-phase flow loop, which consisted of a power system, a metering system, and a mixing pipeline.…”

“…The output layer is set as four types corresponding to the flow patterns: Type 1 (plug flow): 1 0 0 0; Type 2 (slug flow): 0 1 0 0; Type 3 (blocky flow): 0 0 1 0; Type 4 (annular flow): 0 0 0 1. According to literature[8], the length of the monitoring part of horizontal pipe is 200D. The length of the monitoring part for flow pattern of vertical pipe is 240D (intersection of horizontal pipe and vertical pipe).…”