A Multi-Phase Closed Pipelines Simulation Approach for Transportation of Heavy Oil with Openfoam in HPC

Transportation of heavy crude oil through closed pipelines is a challenging issue both in offshore and in land oil transportation. The scope of the present paper deals with the computational modelling of two phase extra heavy crude oil & water flow in OpenFOAM. In order to validate the flow model the pressure variation along the length of the channel are investigated, which shows the typical plot of two roughly constant pressure lines at different levels connected by a sharp change of pressure at the interface of two fluids. The validated flow model, aims at optimizing the kinematic viscosity of the multiphase flow, by regulating the flow velocity of the components, such that there is minimum viscous heat loss and hence minimum pump power consumption from the horizontal centrifugal pumping system. Using the OpenFOAM(Open Source Field Operation & Manipulation) software, which is free opensource software, developed in 2004, under GNU general public license, paraview has been used here as post processing tool. Multiphase flow simulation is done using the k-ɛ turbulence model in HPC of kanchenjungha cluster, NIT Sikkim, India.