Author(s)

Bruno Ferreira Silva¹, Hortência Luma Fernandes Magalhães², Ricardo Soares Gomez¹, Endyara de Morais Cabral¹, Francisco Alves Batista³, Adriana Barbosa da Costa Pereira², Wanderson Magno Paiva Barbosa de Lima¹, Antonio Gilson Barbosa de Lima¹

¹Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande-PB, Brazil.
²Department of Chemical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande-PB, Brazil.
³Department of Physics, State University of Paraiba, Campina Grande-PB, Brazil.

In the scenery of the oil industry, the remaining resources associated with light oils have an increasingly smaller share in the natural energy resources available to man, and in return the importance of resources associated with heavy oils has increased significantly. One of the drawbacks of this type of oil is associated with its low mobility due to the high viscosity in reservoir conditions, making the transport in pipelines very difficult, especially through pumping methods that require high powers. Thus, the development of new techniques and optimization of some existing technologies, aiming at the commercial use of heavy oil accumulations plays an important role. A viable technique that has been used is the core annular flow, in which small amounts of water are injected close to the pipe wall, lubricating the oil core, reducing friction and decreasing the pressure drop during the flow. In this sense, this work aims to perform, numerically, an energetic and hydrodynamic analysis of a heavy oil-water two-phase flow, using the core-flow technique, in curved pipes, in the Ansys CFX software. Results of the velocity, pressure, and volume fraction distribution of the involved phases are presented and analyzed. It was observed that the proposed mathematical model was able to accurately represent the analyzed phenomena and that a reduction factor in the pressure drop of 28.4 was obtained as compared to the heavy oil single-phase flow.

Core-Flow, Simulation, Two-Phase Flow, CFD, Ansys CFX

Silva, B. , Magalhães, H. , Gomez, R. , Cabral, E. , Batista, F. , Pereira, A. , Lima, W. and Lima, A. (2020) Isothermal Transport (Core-Flow Type) of Heavy and Ultraviscous Oil in Curved Pipes: A Transient Study by CFD. Open Journal of Fluid Dynamics, 10, 122-134. doi: 10.4236/ojfd.2020.102008.