Investigation of the Effect of Insulation on Wax Deposition in an Iranian Crude Oil Pipeline with OLGA Simulator

Seyfaee, Ahmad; Lashkarbolooki, Mostafa; Esmaeilzadeh, Feridun; Mowla, Dariush

doi:10.1080/01932691.2011.605649

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…OLGA, Schlumberger company, Huston, Texas, US, is a market-leading computational code for simulating the flow of oil, water, and gas in wells, pipelines, and receiving facilities [54]. Its applications contain flow analysis and assurance [55,56], slug tracking [57], compositional tracking [58], pigging [59], and so on.…”

Section: Verifying the Simulation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical Simulation for Preheating New Submarine Hot Oil Pipelines

et al. 2019

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For new submarine hot oil pipelines, accurate simulation of preheating is difficult owing to complex transient flow and coupled heat transfer happening. Using quasi-steady equations to simulate preheating is inadequate as the hydraulic transient phenomenon is neglected. Considering this fact, this paper constructs an unsteady flow and heat transfer coupled mathematical model for the preheating process. By combining the double method of characteristics (DMOC) and finite element method (FEM), a numerical methodology is proposed, namely, DMOC-FEM. Its accuracy is validated by field data collected from the Bohai sea, China, showing the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 4.27%. Simulation results demonstrate that the preheating medium mainly warms submarine pipe walls rather than the surrounding subsea mud. Furthermore, during the preheating process, the equivalent overall heat transfer coefficients deduced performs more applicably than the inverse-calculation method in presenting the unsteady propagation of fluid temperature with time and distance. Finally, according to the comparison results of 11 preheating plans, subject to a rated heat power and maximum flow, the preheating parameter at a lower fluid temperature combined with a higher flow rate will produce a better preheating effect.

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Section: Verifying the Simulation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical Simulation for Preheating New Submarine Hot Oil Pipelines

et al. 2019

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“…Some techniques have been utilized to decrease or prevent wax deposition in pipelines transporting waxy crude oil. These techniques include chemical additives, thermal insulation, cold flow, antiwax coating, , and mechanical methods. However, these techniques have shortcomings .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of Asphaltenes-Triggered Two-Layer Waxy Oil Gel Deposit under Laminar Flow: An Experimental Study

et al. 2016

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In this work, we investigated the development of asphaltenes-triggered two-layer wax deposit with deposition time using an in-house wax deposition device, DSC, HTGC, SARA, and microscopic observation. For the pure waxy oil (Waxy Oil A), the formed wax deposit is a homogeneous and loose waxy oil gel. The wax deposit mass is relatively high and increases with increasing deposition time, while the wax appearance temperature (WAT), wax content, and ΔW of the wax deposit are relatively low and increase slowly with increasing deposition time. The critical carbon number (CCN) of the wax deposit is C24. The precipitated wax crystals (needlelike) in the wax deposit are liable to form a continuous network structure, which is adverse for the diffusion of wax molecules. The presence of asphaltenes in the pure waxy oil (Waxy Oils B–D) causes the formation of a two-layer wax deposit, which can be clearly characterized by the significant difference of structural strength. Different from the outer-layer wax deposit, the inner-layer wax deposit has smaller mass but higher WAT, wax content, CCN (C26), and asphaltene content. The WAT and wax content of the inner-layer/outer-layer wax deposits increase with increasing deposition time, while the asphaltene content of the inner-layer wax deposit stays almost the same at deposition time ≥ 1 h. The presence of asphaltenes greatly modifies the precipitated wax crystals’ morphology (spherical-like flocs) and then favors the diffusion of asphaltenes and wax molecules. Both molecular diffusion of waxes and Brownian diffusion of asphaltenes result in the formation of the two-layer wax deposit, which is formed by a four-step process. The increase of the original asphaltene content decreases the mass but increases the WAT and wax and asphaltene contents of the inner-layer wax deposit.

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“…[1,11] Several factors are responsible for the wax deposition in the pipelines, including crude oil composition, temperature, flow rate, thermal history, and pressure. [1][2][3][4] Moreover, the amount of deposited wax is affected by the concentration of paraffins, light ends, and nucleating or inhibiting materials in the crude oil. [5,12] Pressure is not considered as an important factor for wax deposition, especially for dead or stock tank oils.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…[1] These problems cause losses of billions of dollars yearly to petroleum industry due to frequent shutdowns and operational problems during transportation, production, storage and consumption, increase the cost of chemicals for deposition inhibition, reduction of production, well shut-in, less utilization of capacity, chocking of the flow lines, equipment failure, extra horsepower requirement, and increased manpower attention. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] The temperature at which the first crystals of paraffin wax start to appear upon cooling of a crude oil is called the wax appearance temperature (WAT), is an important parameter. [1][2][3][4][5] As the crude oil flows through cold environment pipelines, the crude oil temperature in the region of the pipe wall decreases below the WAT; wax components precipitate out of the solution and crystallize, which leads to solid deposition on the pipe wall.…”

Section: Please Scroll Down For Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] The temperature at which the first crystals of paraffin wax start to appear upon cooling of a crude oil is called the wax appearance temperature (WAT), is an important parameter. [1][2][3][4][5] As the crude oil flows through cold environment pipelines, the crude oil temperature in the region of the pipe wall decreases below the WAT; wax components precipitate out of the solution and crystallize, which leads to solid deposition on the pipe wall. [2] Indeed, pipeline blockage removal can be very expensive.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Prediction of Chemical Inhibitors Efficiency for Reducing Deposition Thickness Using Artificial Neural Network

Lashkarbolooki

Seyfaee

Esmaeilzadeh

et al. 2014

Journal of Dispersion Science and Technology

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Prediction of efficiency of chemical inhibitors to mitigation of deposition thickness is a key to developing crude oil transportation process. In this work, a feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm has been applied to predict the influence of the mitigation effect of ethylene-covinyl acetate (EVA) copolymer and its combination with chloroform (C), acetone (A), P-xylene (PX), and petroleum ether (PE) on the deposition thickness in the pipeline. An optimized three-layer feed-forward ANN model using properties of the oil pipeline such as: inlet oil temperature, environmental (coolant mixture) temperature, oil Reynolds numbers; properties of injected inhibitor such as molecular weight, boiling point, and amount of injection; and time is presented. Different networks are considered and trained using 62661 data sets; the accuracy of the network is validated by 20888 testing data sets. To verify the network generalization, 29 different experiment data sets of four different set of inhibitors have been considered. It is found that the proposed ANN model is an alternative to experimentation and predicts deposition thickness without experimentation, vast information, and tedious and time-consuming calculations.

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Investigation of the Effect of Insulation on Wax Deposition in an Iranian Crude Oil Pipeline with OLGA Simulator

Cited by 14 publications

References 13 publications

Numerical Simulation for Preheating New Submarine Hot Oil Pipelines

Numerical Simulation for Preheating New Submarine Hot Oil Pipelines

Development of Asphaltenes-Triggered Two-Layer Waxy Oil Gel Deposit under Laminar Flow: An Experimental Study

Prediction of Chemical Inhibitors Efficiency for Reducing Deposition Thickness Using Artificial Neural Network

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