Escoamento anular não estabelecido de óleo ultraviscoso e água em dutos curvados: análises hidrodinâmica e energética.

Abstract

In the oil industry, the transport of heavy oils in pipelines requires high power pumping due to its high viscosity, which is one of the drawbacks in oils production of this nature, thus emerge a need to develop new technologies that optimize such processes. An economically viable technique that can be used is the core annular flow, where a water layer is responsible for oil lubrication flowing in the center of the duct. In this way, this work presents an energy and hydrodinamic study of the heavy oils transportation in curved connections by numerical simulation via software ANSYS CFX® Release 15.0. It used a mathematical model that considers the mixture model to treat heavy oil-water two-phase flow, three-dimensional, transient and isothermal, assuming laminar flow to oil phase and turbulent flow to water phase, using k-ε turbulence model. An energy analysis involving pumps was performed. Results of pressure, velocity and volumetric fraction fields for the two phases are show and analysed. It was verified that the use of core-flow technique has decreased in 95.4% friction pressure drop as compared to monophase heavy oil flow and that stop-and-go from the oil and water pumps affect pressure drop by friction