Modified Empirical Models for Predicting Liquid Film Thickness in Different-Sized Vertical Pipes

Abstract

The liquid film thickness is a vital parameter in many engineering applications such as production equipment of oil and gas. Good control of fluid flow in such equipment can lead to maintaining a continuous liquid film on the pipe wall and hence increasing the anticipated production rate and avoiding catastrophic consequences. Therefore, a precise estimation of liquid film behavior is required to achieve the targeted production rate and overcome the above-mentioned issues.

Even though a considerable number of empirical models were reported, most of these assessed the fluid flow based on small-sized pipes. These models incorrectly predicted the film thickness if applied to a large-diameter.

This work was aimed at developing correlations for gas-liquid two-phase fluid in order to be applicable for different-sized pipes. The new correlations were evaluated against a wide range of experimental data of liquid film and for different diameters collected from the literature on vertical pipes. It was found that the new correlations can be precisely used for predicting the liquid film behavior in small and large pipe diameters.