STUDY ON PIPE WEAR BASED ON LARGE SCALE EXPERIMENT AND SCALE EFFECT FOR DEEP SEA MINING

For the production of seafloor massive sulfides, the ores are expected to be transported as a slurry up to the sea surface. The pipe wear is caused mainly by the collision of the ores against the pipe wall, thus the evaluation of pipe wear is required for the operation of the production system. The authors conducted a full-scale experiment for evaluating pipe wear due to slurry flow. As the results, the pipe wear resistance of a SUS304 stainless steel is higher than the ultra high molecular weight polyethylene. In addition, the pipe wall thickness was measured before and after the experiment to obtain the distribution of the erosion on the pipe wall. The authors confirmed that the wall thickness reduced uniformly along the circumferential direction for vertical pipe, and the erosion occurred mainly along the bottom surface of the pipe for the horizontal and inclined pipes. Also, the authors investigated the relation between the index of the rock abrasivity and erosion and proposed a correlation for the pipe wear with the index of rock abrasivity. Finally, the authors predicted the pipe wear on the condition of full-scale experiment based on the data obtained in the reduced-scale experiment conducted previously. Then the authors compared the predicted pipe wear with that measured in the full-scale experiment.

Pengaruh Rasio I/D terhadap Permulaan Flooding dan Fluktuasi Voltase Sinyal Tekanan Rezim Flooding pada Geometri Kompleks

A nuclear power plant operation requires reliability safety systems. Therefore, an accidental scenario such as the LOCA becomes a specific attention. This relates to a countercurrent flow phenomenon which permits the occurrence of a flooding regime. This study aims to investigate the effets of I/D ratios of the riser on the onset of flooding and time-series voltage fluctuations of differential pressure signals of the flooding regime on a complex geometry representing a PWR hot leg. The test section contains a combination of a horizontal, an elbow and an inclined pipes. Three I/D ratios containing 1.9 (R1), 3.9 (R2) and 8.3 (R3) were assesed. The tabulated data are expressed in the term of a flooding curve. Meanwhile, the statistical features of the time-series voltage fluctuations of the signals are presented on both PDF and PSD graphs. The results obtained show that the assesed I/D ratios do not conduct significance effects on the onset of flooding. On the other hand, there are trends which can be obtained from the time-series signals with the increase of the I/D ratio. Those trends can also be observed in the such statistical features; the PDF and PSD graphs, respectively.

The numerical development of MOC for analyzing the inclined pipelines using the experimental network of Babol Noshirvani University as a case study

Despite the applications of the MOC for analyzing the unsteady flows, using this method in networks with variable elevations still has many challenges. In this paper, by developing modified correlations as a computer code, the possibility of analyzing inclined pipelines has been evaluated. For validation and calibration, the results of MOC were compared with the results of EPANET software as well as experimental data. To extract experimental data, the water network of NIT with a constant head of 7 m three loops, and four inclined branches were employed. While evaluating the capabilities of the developed computer code, the results show that for all pipes, as the number of pressure fluctuations in a specific period increases, the intensity of the pressure fluctuations decreases, and the damping speed increases as well. Moreover, in inclined pipes, unlike noninclined pipes, the intensity of pressure fluctuations will increase as the elevation increases and the cross-sectional distance from the transient event increases as well. The evaluation of the effect of space steps on the accuracy of the solution to the MOC shows that in the study network, considering 20 segments for each pipe, the fastest response time with an error of less than 1% is obtained.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Simulations of Taylor Bubbles in Vertical and Inclined Pipes with Upward and Downward Liquid Flow

Summary Two-phase flow is a common occurrence in pipes of oil and gas developments. Current predictive tools are based on the mechanistic two-fluid model, which requires the use of closure relations to predict integral flow parameters such as liquid holdup (or void fraction) and pressure gradient. However, these closure relations carry the highest uncertainties in the model. In particular, significant discrepancies have been found between experimental data and closure relations for the Taylor bubble velocity in slug flow, which has been determined to strongly affect the mechanistic model predictions (Lizarraga-García 2016). In this work, we study the behavior of Taylor bubbles in vertical and inclined pipes with upward and downward flow using a validated 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach with level set method implemented in a commercial code. A total of 56 cases are simulated, covering a wide range of fluid properties, pipe diameters, and inclination angles: Eo ∈ [10, 700]; Mo ∈ [1×10–6, 5×103]; ReSL ∈ [–40, 10]; θ ∈ [5°, 90°]. For bubbles in vertical upward flows, the simulated distribution parameter, C0, is successfully compared with an existing model. However, the C0 values of downward and inclined slug flows where the bubble becomes asymmetric are shown to be significantly different from their respective vertical upward flow values, and no current model exists for the fluids simulated here. The main contributions of this work are (1) the relatively large 3D numerical database generated for this type of flow, (2) the study of the asymmetric nature of inclined and some vertical downward slug flows, and (3) the analysis of its impact on the distribution parameter, C0.