Open Collections

Emulating the dynamic behavior of gas-liquid flows in porous media under marine swell conditions for floating platform applications

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

Talk: Regular Abstract: Boundaries for hydrocarbon exploitation are being increasingly stretched towards remoter and deeper spots around the Globe. This entails recourse to floating production systems as an alternative to conventional off-shore oil platforms such as Deep Draft Semi Sub, Extendable Draft Platform, and so forth. Floating platforms are commonly integrated with floating units such as Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO), Floating Production Unit (FPU), Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) and Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) which are used to replace costly pipeline infrastructures and onshore refining-treating facilities. It is thus not a surprise that development and application of floating units, e.g., FPSO and FLNG in deep-water oilfields, are subject to vivid research by the petroleum industry. One of the challenges confronting well-designed units resides on how the efficiency and performance of offshore facilities correlate with the restless sways caused by marine swells and how these latter impact the hydrodynamic characteristics of the reactors that are embarked on-board. In this presentation, we will discuss our recent results on multiphase packed-bed reactors mounted on a six-degrees-of-freedom hexapod robot to emulate swell movements and to analyze the hydrodynamic alterations brought about by separate or combined degrees of freedom under yaw and pitch rotations, and jerky swell movements versus stationary (straight and inclined) bed configurations. A twin-plane capacitance Wire Mesh Sensor (WMS) installed on the moving packed beds is used to measure the dynamic features of local phase distribution patterns, local and averaged liquid saturations and velocities, and flow regime changes under various configurations, e.g., concurrent two-phase upflow, downflow and drainage mode. Deviations from well-known behavior of straight and stationary packed-bed two-phase flows will be highlighted, quantified and interpreted.

Mathematics; Fluid mechanics; Mechanics of particles and systems; Fluid dynamics

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Laval

2017-02-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60549

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/