Multiphase flow can induce high amplitude vibrations in piping systems. Several experimental campaigns have been executed in recent years to better understand this phenomenon. The objective is to develop models to predict the frequency spectra of the forces for different flow regimes. Most of these experiments have been done at low pressure.

 

As part of the continued effort to increase the accuracy in the prediction of the flow induced forces in both the absolute amplitude and in the frequency spectrum, high pressure measurements were undertaken. Vibrations measurements were performed on a 2” loop test site consisting of one 2 × 2m U-loop followed by a 1.5 × 1.5m U-loop separated from each other by clamped supports. This results in effectively two loops with different eigenfrequencies (3.7, 6.8, 10.6 Hz for the small loop; 2.8, 6.6, 8.2 for the large loop).

 

Vibrations measurements were performed with a variation of gas and liquid rate at four different pressures of approximately 10, 20, 40 and 80 bar. At each pressure, gas flow variations were done at fixed liquid rates, resulting in flow conditions ranging for the gas velocity from 1 up to 15 m/s and for the liquid rate from 0.75 up to 4 m/s. For the liquid both an aqueous phase (rich MEG) and oil were used. 

 

In this paper, the test setup and the base results are presented. These include the influence of pressure on the multiphase flow induced forces for both gas/water and gas/oil flow conditions. For both fluids, the vibrations reduced significantly when the pressure increased. As example, at a condition of Usl = 0.75 m/s, Usg = 6 m/s, the vibration decreased from 44 mm/s (10 bar) down to 9 mm/s (80 bar).


Multiphase Flow Induced Vibrations at High Pressure

Division / Sponsors: 
Pressure Vessels & Piping (PVP)


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/PVP2020/volume/83815

PVP2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.