Flownex Video: Crude Oil Network in Flownex – Part 1

Flownex Video: Crude Oil Network – Part 1 Hello everyone, this is Mohsen Seraj, an application engineer from the other engineering technical team. Today, I want to talk about the next video, which is about the pipeline and the transportation of crude oil.

As you can see schematically at the bottom, we usually have oil tankers that use single-point moorings before the main terminals to collect the oil from the tankers.

From these offshore terminals, we send the oil to the booster station (a pump station) and then to the onshore station booster station, many kilometers inside the sea.

After that, for removing salt from the crude oil, it goes to storage facilities that we have, with many reservoirs, for example, 40 million barrels. In this talk, we want to make some improvements to the model. Suppose you are a maintenance engineer supervising the pipeline.

First, we want to use the crude oil material as a fluid material, which is new to the system and not included in the library. You can use the video I created for custom material.

In the next part, we want to see the effect of ambient temperature on the fluid material and the flow delivery of the pipeline. We know that because of the pipeline's depth (35 meters) in seawater, we can have a different temperature along the pipeline.

If we add heat transfer elements to the pipeline, we can model the heat conduction along the pipeline and thermal inertia of the pipe. We want to see the effect of adding this heat transfer element to the pipeline system on the flow delivery and the temperature along the pipeline.

At the end, we want to see the variation in the pipeline's capacity for the flow delivery if we want to offload crude oil at 60 degrees Celsius instead of 20 degrees Celsius. Let's start by solving the problem.

This is the schematic of the pipeline, extracted from a Flownex tutorial about the crude oil pipeline. I created this from that tutorial and made it simple for the preparation for this video.

The fluid network consists of single-point moorings, marine floating terminals, pump stations for booster pumps, and salt dome storage facilities.

We have boundary conditions dictated from the tankers and SPMs (Single Point Moorings) at 1500 kilopascals and 1.5 megapascals, with a temperature of 60 degrees Celsius for the oil. The elevation is 35 degrees in depth of the seawater, and then the same depth of the pipes.

We go up 35 meters above the sea level for the terminals and then have pipelines that go down 35 meters below the sea level and send the crude oil to the booster pump stations. On land, we have pipelines that end up at the salt facilities.

For the pipes, we have a 40,000-meter pipe (40 kilometers) with a 1.2-diameter, a 10x pipe in the sea that is 30 kilometers long, and some other parts that are shorter. For example, one is 70 meters long, and the next pipe is 30 kilometers long.

After the main inter marine terminals, the diameter is 1. 2. In the first part, we need to add new materials. If we come here to the chart and look at the lookup tables, we can see that in the pure fluid materials, I can right-click and add a new category.

I already showed the details in a separate video. I added a new category called petroleum and then added a new pure fluid called crude oil. I considered it incompressible, with a density of 900 according to the tables given for the material properties.

The viscosity is a linear function of the temperature, so I added the coefficients for that. The conductivity is 0.06 what permitted Kelvin, according to those conditions. Now, let's see how to add new materials to the network. We need to add a new fluid to the network elements.

I already did this and used the petroleum category added here. Now, we can see that in every element in the network pipe network, we have the same fluid. We can see it for the pumps, next pipes, and even for the reservoirs. Now, we can go and check the new materials and the new fluid properties.

We can solve the model and see the temperature distribution. We can see that the temperature is around 60 degrees, a little bit below or above that. It is the 60-degree temperature that we have at the start point of the network.

The distribution is not accurate when we consider the effect of the environment and ambient temperature in the sea and onshore on the land for mass flow rate. Everywhere, the mass flow rate is the same.

For example, here, the total mass flow rate is 34,565.7 kilograms per second, and the temperature is 62.1331 degrees Celsius. Similarly, for the temperature and pressure for the reservoir, we can see the results.

Another way to see the results is to click on the result tab and see the different parameters that Flownex calculated at the background.

We have the flow delivery of 34,565.7 kilograms per second delivered to the oil reserves at the salt facility and also the temperature into 63.213 before adding the heat transfer elements. For the second part, let's add heat transfer elements to model the heat transfer effect.

We will work with composite transfer, which means that we have different mechanisms included in this element. We can add a node upstream and boundaries. If we check the properties, we see that we need inputs for conduction, convection, and radiation or other heat transfer mechanisms.

Let's start with conduction for the layers. We can click here to open the window for the layers, add a layer, and for the thickness of the element in the direction, we can add 0.5 meters.

For the number of nodes, we can increase it to 3. For the material data, instead of specifying it locally, we can go for select from data reference and then click here to go to the metals and choose the carbon steel. Now, let's select the elements and nodes to be added to the pipe.

For the conduction area, we can say that it's from the neutral area and the left side belongs to transfer. This is for high-induced value, and the rest of the difference here is 0. The application is the same information as the cut and division around process data sources.

For the conduction area, we can say that it's left and copy right side of the user dnd g that we have to descobetisment and read it some Citizenship configuration data.

We can select some parts from it to allow details below that we want to Dies pan element dot Lubricate notice that here's a fine cut Microdynamic hundred percent and some components. Now, we almost done for the conduction setup. Let's move on to other heat transfer mechanisms for opposite ends.

We choose convection and convection option to ambient. We use the same area as in conduction for convection to and also use the constant H or convection coefficient and magnitude of 1000. We keep the ambient temperature at 15 degrees Celsius.

We also set up the convection heat transfer for downstream, with the same area as in conduction, constant H, and here 60 watt per meter squared Kelvin for H downstream. Now, we have set up everything for this heat transfer element, with conduction for the layer and convection for opposite ends.

We can add this heat transfer element to other pipes in the network. We can copy and paste it at this ad sos element to this pipe too and also at the heat transfer element to the last pipe. Now, we have added 30 heat transfer S elements.

Let's make sure that the smalltan in theと we have an image and table with volume to it heat transfer elements that we have these are composited transfer elements that we have the setup for convection and conduction together.

For the last heat transfer element, because it is connected to the pipe that it is on land, we have to reduce this to 20 the magnitude of the convection coefficient and ambient temperature to 25. Now, we are almost done, and we can go and check the solution and run the simulation in the home section.

We can see the details in the console and for the results layer. We can check the variation of temperature along the pipe. We can see that the pipeline temperature changes from high temperature (60 degrees Celsius) to almost 31 degrees Celsius at the end.

The total mass transfer has reduced to 30,030.4 kilograms per second. These are the parameters that we can see for the temperature variation in the pipeline. In the reservoir, the temperature drops to 29.9 degrees, used to be 61 or 62 degrees. We can also check the mass flow rate.

The total mass flow rate is almost 30,000 everywhere, but if we check velocity, it depends on the pipe diameter. Now, we can see the effect of adding heat transfer elements to the piping system.

The temperature changes along the pipeline from high temperature (60 degrees Celsius) to almost 30 degrees Celsius at the end. As a maintenance engineer, you can see that the pipeline can deliver about 30,000 kilograms per second to the oil reservoirs.

The last part remaining is to see if we change the temperature from 20 degrees to 50 degrees Celsius, the results will be pushed to re estélinity with much more flood propio. Now, I would like to show you some examples of Muslim-metal pipes that are under the sea.

We set them to match the resistance to the soil without initial, which is actually the final part of our microscope. This is the total different results that we will work on in the next part of this video. Please watch the second part of this video. Thank you so much.