A study on the relationship between upstream and downstream conditions in swirling two-phase flow

Benjamin Sahovic (1) , Hanane Atmani (2) , Philipp Wiedemann (1) , Eckhard Schleicher (1) , Dominique Legendre (2) , Eric Climent (2) , Rémi Zamansky (2) , Annaig Pedrono (2) , Uwe Hampel (1, 3)

1 HZDR - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
2 IMFT - Institut de mécanique des fluides de Toulouse
3 TU Dresden - Technische Universität Dresden = Dresden University of Technology

Inline fluid separation is a concept, which is used in the oil and gas industry. Inline fluid separators typically have a static design and hence changing inlet conditions lead to less efficient phase separation. For introducing flow control into such a device, additional information is needed about the relationship of upstream and downstream conditions. This paper introduces a study on this relationship for gas/liquid two-phase flow. The downstream gas core development was analyzed for horizontal device installation in dependence of the inlet gas and liquid flow rates. A wire-mesh sensor was used for determining two-phase flow parameters upstream and a high-speed video camera to obtain core parameters downstream the swirling device. For higher accuracy of the calculated void fraction, a novel method for wire-mesh sensor data analysis has been implemented. Experimental results have shown that void fraction data of the wire-mesh sensor can be used to predict the downstream behavior for a majority of the investigated cases. Additionally, the upstream flow pattern has an impact on the stability of the gas core downstream which was determined by means of experimental data analysis.

Mots clés: Gas/liquid flow; Inline fluid separation; Swirling element; Wire-mesh sensor; Digital image processing; High-speed camera

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Benjamin Sahovic, Hanane Atmani, Philipp Wiedemann, Eckhard Schleicher, Dominique Legendre, et al.. A study on the relationship between upstream and downstream conditions in swirling two-phase flow. Flow Measurement and Instrumentation, 2020, 74, pp.101767. ⟨10.1016/j.flowmeasinst.2020.101767⟩. ⟨hal-03163383⟩