An improved computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for predicting hydrate deposition rate and wall shear stress in offshore gas-dominated pipeline

Gas hydrates in pipelines is still a flow assurance problem in the oil and gas industry and requires a proactive hydrate plugging risk predicting model. As an active area of research, this work has developed a 3D 10 m length by 0.0204 m diameter horizontal pipe CFD model based on the eulerian-eulerian multiphase modelling framework to predict hydrate deposition rate in gas-dominated pipeline. The proposed model simulates the conditions for hydrate formation with user defined functions (UDFs) for both energy and mass sources implemented in ANSYS Fluent, a commercial CFD software. The empirical hydrate deposition rates predicted by this model at varying subcooling temperatures and gas velocities are consistent with experimental results within ±10% uncertainty bound. At lower gas velocity of 4.7 m/s, the model overpredicted the hydrate deposition rates of the experimental results in Aman et al. (2016) by 9–25.7%, whereas the analytical model of Di Lorenzo et al. (2018) underpredicted the same experimental results by a range of 27–33%. Consequently, the CFD model can enhance proactive hydrate plugging risk predictions earlier than the analytical model, especially at low gas productivity. Similarly, at a velocity of 8.8 m/s and subcooling temperatures of 2.5 K, 7.1 K and 8.0 K, the CFD model underpredicted the hydrate deposition rates of the regressed experimental results in Di Lorenzo et al. (2014a) by 14%, 6% and 4% respectively, and overpredicted the results by 1% at a subcooling temperature of 4.3 K. From the CFD model results, we also suggest that hydrate sloughing shear stress is relatively constant, and the wall shedding shear stress by hydrate vary during deposition. Finally, the CFD model also predicted the phase change during hydrate formation, agglomeration, and deposition.