Development of a heat-balance model for the characterization of wax blockage in flowlines

摘要

The presence of a blockage in a pipeline will alter the fluid dynamics of a flowingsystem in terms of the heat, mass and velocity characteristics. The analysis of the fluiddynamics is based on balances taken on the overall system to qualitatively andquantitatively assess the effects of the blockage. Pioneer work in the area of mass andmomentum effects of blockages led to the development of blockage type curves useful incharacterizing blockages from limited information. This work is an extension ofprevious work and is based on the application of a simplistic energy balance approach tocharacterize blockages in pipelines. The resulting heat models for the case of both apartially and fully-blocked flowline correctly predict the effect of wax deposition.Dimensionless temperature-based blockage maps developed here can be used inmodeling unique cases where only two of the three necessary conditions are given. Theheat model matches results from commercial software within a limited range ofrestricted flow conditions.