Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental Investigation of Regular or Wavy Two-Phase Flow in a Manifold

Xiaowei Nie¹, Lihui Ma^2,*, Yiqiu Xu³, Dong Sun², Weibo Zheng², Liang Zhou², Xiaodong Wang², Xiaohan Zhang², Weijia Dong², Yunfei Li²

1 Sionpec Shengli Oilfield Company, Dongying, 257000, China
2 Technical Inspection Center, Sionpec Shengli Oilfield Company, Dongying, 257000, China
3 Offshore Oil Engineering Co., Ltd., Dongying, 257000, China

* Corresponding Author: Lihui Ma. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advanced Oil and Gas Transportation and Treatment Technologies)

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2023, 19(1), 37-50. https://doi.org/10.32604/fdmp.2023.021118

Received 28 December 2021; Accepted 24 January 2022; Issue published 02 August 2022

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the properties of stratified regular or wavy two-phase flow in two parallel separators located after a manifold. A total of 103 experiments with various gas and liquid velocity combinations in three inlet pipes were conducted, including 77 groups of outlet pipe resistance symmetry and 26 groups of outlet pipe resistance asymmetry trials. The experimental results have revealed that when the gas-liquid flow rate is low, the degree of uneven splitting is high, and “extreme” conditions are attained. When the superficial gas velocity is greater than that established in the extreme case, the direction of the liquid-phase displacement is reversed, while that of the gas remains unchanged. Thus, the degree of gas phase bias tends to be mitigated with an increase in the gas velocity, while the uneven splitting degree of liquid approaches 10%. Finally, varying the gas-phase outlet pipe resistance is shown to effectively change the gas-liquid two-phase flow distribution.

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Keywords

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