11243 Predicting Sand Erosion in Slug Flows Using a Two-Dimensional Mechanistic Model

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Product Number: 51300-11243-SG

ISBN: 2011 11243 CP

Author: Yongli Zhang, Brenton S. McLaury, Siamack A. Shirazi and Edmund F. Rybicki

Publication Date: 2011

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In the oil and gas industry, slug flow is commonly encountered and one of the most erosive flow regimes when sand is entrained. The design of oil and gas production equipment requires a reliable erosion prediction tool. Chen et al.¹ proposed an approach for estimating erosion rate in slug flows. It is a combination of mechanistic analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Shirazi et al.²and McLaury et al.³ presented a method based on some onedimensional mechanistic models (hence called 1-D method) to predict erosion rate. This method is successful in predicting erosion caused by relatively large sand (>50 microns) but dramatically under-predicts for very small sand (~20 microns). The current authors presented an improved method by introducing two-dimensional mechanistic models (hence called 2-D method)4. It has been shown that for gas/solid or liquid/solid flows, the 2-D method performs very well in predicting erosion for both large and small sand. This method is being extended for handling gas/liquid/solid flows. This paper explains its application in slug flows. Results from both 1-D and 2-D methods are compared with experimental data. It is shown that overall, the 2-D method performs much better then the 1-D method.

Keywords: Sand Erosion, Particle Tracking, Erosion Modeling, Slug Flow