Fluidodinâmica computacional (CFD) aplicada a escoamento Core Annular Flow através de dutos horizontais e curvados

Abstract

In recent years there has been an exponential increase in oil consumption worldwide, which has caused the increasing depletion of the main light oil reserves and onshore reserves. In view of this growth, a large part of the studies was directed to the reserve of high viscosity oil, as well as offshore reserves. However, one of the main obstacles is the transport of oil, as this requires advanced studies to avoid oil encrustation on the walls of the pipeline, thus creating the need for new research aimed at carrying viscous oils, since a sum of those are exploited in Brazil are of a low API grade, therefore, of high viscosity. A viable technique for this type of flow is the “Core Annular flow”, in which a thin layer of water flows on the duct wall while the oil flows in the central region. Thus, the present work presents a simulation of oil and water transport by the Core Annular flow method via ANSYS FLUENT® software. In carrying out the simulation, a two-phase water-oil flow model was used, with a laminar regime for the oil phase and turbulent for the aqueous phase, adopting the interface model VOF model and the turbulence model k−ε. The results obtained in the simulation were compared to the article by Haoyu Li, et al., (2021), to evaluate the fit of the mathematical model and the development of the Core flow in a computational fluid dynamics software little used in the prediction of annular flow. The results showed the formation of the annular flow pattern as observed in the article by Haoyu Li, et al., (2021) and that the slope of the pipe is an important property that can lead to a change in the flow pattern.