Severe Slugging in Air-Water Hybrid Riser System

• Main Authors: Jing Gong, Zhiyuan Yang, Liang Ma, Ping Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2014-11-01
• Series: Advances in Mechanical Engineering
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/953213

In the subsea pipeline gathering system, severe slugging flow is prone to occur. Severe slugging flow brings major threat to production and flow assurance in oil and gas industry due to periodical pressure oscillation and large liquid volume. Currently many researchers pay much more attention on L -shaped riser, catenaries, and S -shaped riser; little research has been made on hybrid riser, which is applied in the Africa West and Gulf of Mexico oil fields. Flow characteristics simulation for hybrid riser is made in this paper, using the one-dimensional and quasi-equilibrium model to simulate not only the riser-base pressure, severe slugging period, and the liquid slug length of the whole system but also base-pressure in the flexible pipe section. The calculated results match well with the experiment data. Besides, the influence of flexible pipe to the severe slugging characteristics of hybrid riser system is analyzed, which are significant for the determination of riser structure.