Published Article

Technology has always been the driving force of the oil and gas industry. Due to the complex nature of multiphase flow, expert knowledge is required in the industry to make reasonable prediction of flow parameters. The question of accuracy, however, remains a matter of debate, thus the need for comparison. By setting similar conditions of pipe geometry, temperature, and input flow conditions; pressure drop and fluid velocity for oil and gas were modelled and measured using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experimental method respectively. A comparison is made from both methods to validate CFD. This was achieved by an experiment conducted in the Coventry University multiphase flow loop laboratory. The flow configuration is a two-phase oil and gas flow through a vertical pipe flow of 1.5m height and 80mm internal diameter. Pressure was measured from point 1 to 4 corresponding to heights of 1.3m, 1m, 0.5m, 0.2m respectively across the vertical pipe. The flow regime and velocity profile were obtained using an Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) sensor. CFD simulation was run with the same conditions used in the experiment with the aid of ANSYS 16.1 CFX software. The final results were compared to check error margin between the simulation and the experiments. A 4.03% error was calculated from the experimental results for pressure drop from PT 1 to PT 4 which is not too far from expected. However, the gas velocity results obtained from CFD simulation were quite different from that of the Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) sensor from the experiments as it gave a higher error margin of 23.76%. The analysis concludes that CFD is a valid tool for making prediction in the oil and gas industry.