Alsarkhi Abdelsalam, Salah Mustafa
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Center for Integrative Petroleum Research, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia.
Polymers (Basel). 2023 Feb 23;15(5):1108. doi: 10.3390/polym15051108.
This paper presents a comprehensive experimental investigation concerning the effect of drag reducing polymers (DRP) on enhancing the throughput and reducing the pressure drop for a horizontal pipe carrying two-phase flow of air and water mixture. Moreover, the ability of these polymer entanglements to damp turbulence waves and changing the flow regime has been tested at various conditions, and a clear observation showed that the maximum drag reduction always occurs when the highly fluctuated waves were reduced effectively by DRP (and that, accordingly, phase transition (flow regime changed) appeared. This may also help in improving the separation process and enhancing the separator performance. The present experimental set-up has been constructed using a test section of 1.016-cm ID; an acrylic tube section was used to enable visual observations of the flow patterns. A new injection technique has been utilized and, with the use of different injection rates of DRP, the results have shown that the reduction in pressure drop occurred in all flow configurations. Furthermore, different empirical correlations have been developed which improve the ability to predict the pressure drop after the addition of DRP. The correlations showed low discrepancy for a wide range of water and air flow rates.
本文针对减阻聚合物（DRP）对水平管道中空气 - 水混合两相流提高通量和降低压降的影响展开了全面的实验研究。此外，还在各种条件下测试了这些聚合物缠结抑制湍流波和改变流型的能力，并且有明确观察结果表明，当减阻聚合物有效降低高度波动的波时（相应地，出现了相变（流型改变）），总能实现最大减阻效果。这也可能有助于改进分离过程并提高分离器性能。本实验装置采用内径为1.016厘米的试验段构建；使用丙烯酸管段以便能够目视观察流型。采用了一种新的注入技术，通过使用不同的减阻聚合物注入速率，结果表明在所有流动配置中压降均有所降低。此外，还开发了不同的经验关联式，这些关联式提高了预测添加减阻聚合物后压降的能力。这些关联式在很宽的水和空气流速范围内显示出较低的偏差。
