Developing New Methodologies to the Simulation of Emulsion Mixtures with Transport of Particles in OpenFOAM

• Author / Creator

  Gao, Mingze

• Sand separators are commonly equipped inline in the oil and gas production to separate produced sand from the extracted fluids, usually a mixture of oil, water and gas. To ensure the equipment can satisfy the work conditions, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used. However, the presence of water-oil emulsions can significantly affect the flow regime, mainly because of its viscosity. The emulsion viscosity tends to increase dramatically (10 to 100 times) when the water cut is before the inversion point and decreases sharply after the inversion point. This phenomenon cannot be correctly captured with current multiphase mixture models. Also, the CFD simulation results of the sand separation cases can have a large discrepancy in terms of the separation efficiency of up to 100%, compared to experimental results. As a result, the overall objective of this project is to develop a multiphase, incompressible CFD-DEM solver that can accurately simulate the flow regime of water-oil emulsions with the transport of sand. To achieve this goal, two solvers, denseParticleFoam and multiphaseInterFoam, were selected from OpenFOAM for modification. Also, the entire project was split into three phases. The first phase mainly focused on modifications of the denseParticleFoam, which included converting the governing equations to the strong conservation form and improving its efficiency. In the second phase, a new viscosity model was created based on experimental results, and the new viscosity equation was implemented in the Volume of Fluid method solver of OpenFOAM (multiphaseInterFoam). In addition, the modified Volume of Fluid method was validated to ensure it is bug-free and able to return the correct viscosity for emulsion mixtures. Lastly, the third phase consisted in developing a new set of governing equations, so that the modified denseParticleFoam from phase one can be coupled with the Volume of Fluid method from multiphaseInterFoam. For this thesis, the first, second phase, and the theory part of the third phase have been accomplished.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Emulsion viscosity
  • OpenFoam
  • CFD
  • DEM
  • Multiphase flow

• Graduation date

  Fall 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-zdh1-zt80

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.