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University of Huddersfield Repository Al-Hinai, Sulaiyam Non-invasive velocity and volume fraction profile measurement in multiphase flows Original Citation Al-Hinai, Sulaiyam (2010) Non-invasive velocity and volume fraction profile measurement in multiphase flows. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9094/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ NON-INVASIVE VELOCITY AND VOLUME FRACTION PROFILE MEASUREMENT IN MULTIPHASE FLOWS SULAIYAM M. AL-HINAI B.Eng., M.Sc. A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in Partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of Huddersfield June 2010 The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns any copyright in it (the “Copyright”) and he has given The University of Huddersfield the right to use such Copyright for any administrative, promotional, educational and/or teaching purposes. i. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts, may be made only in accordance with the regulations of the University Library. Details of these regulations may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. ii. The ownership of any patents, designs, trademarks and any and all other intellectual property rights except for the Copyright (“the Intellectual Property Rights”) and any reproductions of copyright works, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property Rights and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions. 2 DECLARATION DECLARATION No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, praise to the God Almighty for His blessings on me which enabled me to complete this thesis on time. Secondly, I would like to thank many people in my beloved Country, the Sultanate of Oman, and here at Huddersfield University for their generous help and valuable contributions to my project and my studies in general. They are many and I am forever grateful to them all: I am very grateful to my supervisor, Prof. Gary Lucas for his excellent supervision. His wisdom, knowledge, and kindness were an inspiration to me. Without his constructive comments, excellent support, continuous encouragement, guidance, reassurance and motivation I would not be able to complete this work. Special thanks are extended to all staff and colleagues in the School of Computing and Engineering at Huddersfield University for their guidance and help during my PhD. Special thanks go to my colleague Qahtan Al-Yarubi, Abbas and Hussam for support and encouragement. Qahtan, thank you again and I wish you all the best in your life. I would like to thank deeply, Dr Xin Zhao continues encouragements and his discussion with me to solve the problems I met when I was doing this research. I wish to thank Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) for supporting my education in the U.K. My deepest gratitude goes to the following personnel at PDO: Saif Al-Hinai (Oil director in PDO) and Suleiman Al-Tobi (Engineering and Operations Director in PDO), for their endless support, help, advice and constructive discussions. Many special thanks to my family in Oman for their support and continuous encouragement, especially my brother Juma, for these substantial encouragements from the time I was in my primary school till now. Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my dear wife for her almost endless support and patience throughout my PhD. I promise you that I will make amends when I finish with much fun in the coming years, hopefully. 4 ABSTRACT ABSTRACT Multiphase flow is the simultaneous flow of two or more phases, in direct contact, and is important in the oil industry, e.g. in production wells, in sub-sea pipelines and during the drilling of wells. The behaviour of the flow will depend on the properties of the constituent phases, the flow velocities and volume fractions of the phases and the geometry of the system. In solids-in-liquid flows, measurement of the local solids volume fraction distribution and the local axial solids velocity distribution in the flow cross section is important for many reasons including health and safety and economic reasons, particularly in oil well drilling operations. However upward inclined solids- liquid flows which are frequently encountered during oil well drilling operations are not well understood. Inclined solids-liquid flows result in non-uniform profiles of the solids volume fraction and axial solids velocity in the flow cross-section. In order to measure the solids volumetric flow rate in these situations it is necessary to measure the distributions of the local solids volume fraction and the local axial solids velocity and then to integrate the product of these local properties in the flow cross section. This thesis describes the development of a non-intrusive Impedance Cross-Correlation (ICC) device to measure the local solids volume fraction distribution and the local solids axial solids velocity distribution in upward inclined solids-water flows in which these distributions are highly non-uniform. The ICC device comprises a non-conductive pipe section of 80mm internal diameter fitted with two arrays of electrodes, denoted „array A‟ and „array B‟, separated by an axial distance of 50mm. At each array, eight electrodes are equispaced over the internal circumference of the pipe. A control system consisting of a microcontroller and analogue switches is used such that, for arrays A and B, any of the eight electrodes can be configured as an „excitation electrode‟ (V+), a „virtual earth measurement electrode‟ (Ve) or an „earth electrode‟ (E) thus enabling the local mixture conductance in different regions of the flow cross-section to be measured and thereby allowing the local solids volume fraction in each region to be deduced. The conductance signals from arrays A and B are also cross-correlated to yield the local solids axial velocity in the regions of flow under interrogation. A number of experiments were carried out in solids-in-water flows in a flow loop with an 80 mm inner diameter, 1.68m long Perspex test section which was inclined at three different inclination angle to the vertical ( 0 o ,15o and30o ). The obtained results show good quantitative agreement with previous work carried out using intrusive local probes. Integration of the flow profiles in the cross section also yielded excellent quantitative agreement with reference measurements of the mean solids volume fraction, the mean solids velocity and the solids volumetric flow rate. Furthermore, this study also showed good qualitative agreement with high speed film of the flow. It is believed that the method of velocity and volume fraction profile measurement described in this thesis is much simpler to implement, more accurate and less expensive than the currently very popular technique of dual-plane Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT). Finally, the thesis describes a mathematical model for predicting the axial velocity distribution of inclined solids-water flows using the solids volume fraction profiles measured by the ICC device. Good agreement was obtained between the predicted velocity profiles and the velocity profiles measured using the ICC device. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION............................................................................................................ 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................... 4 ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................. 6 LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... 11 LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... 24 NOMENECLATURE LIST ........................................................................................ 26 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION................................................................................ 32 1.1 MOTIVATION ..................................................................................................