Abstract
A novel Enlarged Impacting Tee-Junction (EIT), which introduces longer slugs to be dissipated utilizing “Single-Branch-Blocking” is studied experimentally and theoretically under stationary slug-injection conditions to further understand the dissipation mechanism through observation of longer slugs.
The EIT test section is designed and constructed, which consists of one inlet pipe connected to a larger, perpendicular pipe allowing flow in both directions. The inlet is 4.6 m of 0.05 m diameter pipe, while the perpendicular “manifold” is 0.074 m in diameter and 5.5 m in length. In order to observe the dissipation of longer slugs, a modification is made to the Normal EIT configuration. The longer slugs in the EIT are generated by blocking one of the EIT branches, allowing flow in only the unblocked branch of the EIT. Thus, the entire injected slug (rather than half in the case of no blocking configuration) dissipates in the branch. For this configuration, stationary slugs are injected into the EIT with lengths of 40d, 50d, 60d, and 70d (with d being the inlet diameter). A total of 64 slug injection tests are conducted utilizing both air-water and air-oil flow.
The experimental data show that slug dissipation has a nonlinear increasing relationship with mixture velocity. Furthermore, the data show that higher dissipation length is observed with air-water flow as compared to air-oil flow in the slug injection experiments due to higher shed slug volume of oil. Also, the acquired data are used to validate the EIT slug dissipation model developed by Mohammadikharkeshi (2018). For the Single-Branch-Blocking investigation, comparison between the acquired experimental data and the modified Mohammadikharkeshi (2018) Normal EIT model predictions reveals excellent comparison, with an average discrepancy of 12%.
