Identifying the intermittent flow sub-regimes using pressure drop time series fluctuations

Abstract

From a literature survey, it has been noticed a lack of objective methods to identify and distinct between the intermittent flow sub-regimes. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyze pressure drop fluctuations using statistical methods in order to propose simple tools to characterize the sub-regimes of the intermittent flow. The pressure drop time series were collected from experiments carried out using air-water mixture and 30 mm ID pipe. The utilization of transparent pipes allowed to identify three sub-regimes which are Plug flow, Less Aerated Slug flow (LAS flow), and Highly Aerated Slug flow (HAS flow). It was found that the PDF displayed a unimodal distribution in all cases studied. Meanwhile, the representation of the base width and maximum values of PDF as function of the gas-to-liquid superficial velocities ratio and the mixture Froude number, respectively, showed that the points for each sub-regime are clustered in the same zone. So, these two feature spaces can be used to identify the sub-regimes. A third feature space, based on the statistical parameters standard deviation and kurtosis, was also proposed as a tool to distinguish between the three sub-regimes.

Analysis of Horizontal Gas-liquid Intermittent Flow Sub-Regimes Transitions: Physical Mechanisms and Flow Maps

“…The interaction of the intermittent ow with the pipes (one of the major challenges of the intermittent ow as explained in the recent review paper about slug ow presented by Mohmmed et al (2021) can be better understood by considering the sub-regimes (Arabi et al, 2021d)). These ndings highlight the importance of using this sub-regime classi cation for a better knowledge of the intermittent ow (Arabi et al, 2024b).…”

Analysis of Horizontal Gas-liquid Intermittent Flow Sub-Regimes Transitions: Physical Mechanisms and Flow Maps

“…The interaction of intermittent flow with pipes (one of the main challenges of intermittent flow as explained in the recent review paper on slug flow presented by Mohmmed et al (2021)) can be better understood by considering sub-regimes (Arabi et al, 2021d). These findings underline the importance of using this sub-regime classification for a better understanding of intermittent flow (Arabi et al, 2024b).…”

Analysis of Horizontal Gas-liquid Intermittent Flow Sub-Regimes Transitions: Physical Mechanisms and Flow Maps

“…The interaction of intermittent ow with pipes (one of the main challenges of intermittent ow as explained in the recent review paper on slug ow presented by Mohmmed et al (2021)) can be better understood by considering sub-regimes (Arabi et al, 2021d). These ndings underline the importance of using this sub-regime classi cation for a better understanding of intermittent ow (Arabi et al, 2024b). This classi cation method has allowed a number of ow maps to be drawn up for pipes with internal diameters of 16 mm (Dinaryanto et al, 2018), 20 mm (Zhai et al, 2023), 25 mm (Thaker and Banerjee, 2016) and 26 mm (Humami et al, 2018).…”