An Analysis of Pressure Drop and Holdup for Liquid‐Liquid Upflow through Vertical Pipes

Abstract

The present study has attempted to investigate pressure drop and holdup during simultaneous flow of two liquids through a vertical pipe. The liquids selected were kerosene and water. The measurements were made for phase velocities varying from 0.05-1.2 m/s for both liquids. The pressure drop was measured with a differential pressure transducer while the quick closing valve (QCV) technique was adopted for the measurement of liquid holdup. The measured holdup and pressure drop were analyzed with suitable theoretical models according to the existing flow patterns. The analysis reveals that the homogeneous model is suitable for dispersed bubbly flow whereas bubbly and churn-turbulent flow pattern is better predicted by the drift flux model. On the other hand, the two fluid flow model accurately predicts the pressure drop in core annular flow.

Review of oil–water through pipes

“…Some of the researchers were found to have a disagreement pertaining to the factors that affect the losses of pressure in the pipes. Among others are Vuong et al [36], Vielma et al [35], Jana et al [37], Chakrabarti et al [38] and Trallero et al…”

“…Vielma et al [35] also stated that there was no significant effect of pressure drop during high oil superficial velocity at any water superficial velocity due to the presence of oil droplets in all flowing conditions. On the other hand, Jana et al [37] found that the in-situ proportion or liquid holdup has an effect on the pressure drop in a vertical section. They believed that the in-situ proportion is usually not equal in a liquid-liquid system due to the slip effect in which the lighter fluid moves faster than the heavier one.…”

“…The pressure drop in oil-water flow has been studied thoroughly across horizontal, vertical and inclined angles [37,[59][60][61]72,100,102,118] with various operating conditions using different oil viscosity ranging from low to high viscosity. Changes of pressure gradient could be greatly related to phase inversion or flow pattern transitions [30].…”

“…These include designing water-lubricated pipelines, production optimization, optimum string selection, production-logging interpretation, downhole metering, and artificial lift design and modelling [29]. There are many researchers [27,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] who performed comprehensive studies in this particular area. The need to understand the nature and flow behaviour of oil and water is very crucial since multiphase flow is known to be a complex system and highly problematical due to the existence of various flow patterns and diverse governing mechanisms [30,47].…”

Characteristics of water holdup for oil and water mixture flows in horizontal, vertical, and inclined pipes

“…Input water fraction against the slip velocity ratio and water holdup in vertically dispersed flows. Alkaya [18] À3.5 4.0 6.9 9 Flores et al [1] 2.2 6.2 13.4 30 Jana et al [21] À0.2 8.1 14.0 48 Mukherjee et al [2] À2.1 7.2 8.5 38 Xu et al [11] 5.6 11.6 16.8 80 Figure 6. Comparison between experimental and predicted water holdups in horizontal flows.…”