Numerical Analysis of Thermal Mixing in a Swirler-Embedded Line-Heater for Flow Assurance in Subsea Pipelines

Abstract

Flow assurance issue in subsea pipelines arises mainly due to hydrate plugs. We present a new line-heater for prevention of hydrate plug formation in subsea pipelines. The line heater has modular compact design where an electrical heater and a swirl generator are embedded inside the housing pipe so that the stream can be heated efficiently and homogeneously. In this paper, flow and heat transfer characteristics of the line heater are investigated numerically, with a particular emphasis on the mixing effect due to the swirl generator.

Thermal system for a new flexible composite tank

“…At present, the heating and insulation efficiency of pipelines can reach 90% through use of combined Frontiers in Materials frontiersin.org applications (Angays, 2011). A combination of heating and insulation has been recognized as the most efficient method, and studies have focused on multiple layers of insulation (An and Su, 2015;Parsazadeh and Duan, 2015), the influence of different heating efficiency on heating effects (González et al, 2018), and the application of other methods, such as electrically trace heated pipe-in-pipe (Jez et al, 2020) and eddy current manufacturers (Park et al, 2015). However, most of the studies remain at the stage of theory and numerical simulation and lack relevant model testing.…”