Numerical study of the transient behaviors of vapour-liquid equilibrium state CO2 decompression

The vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) state of CO2 commonly appears in pipelines for its transport, refrigeration systems, and large-scale trans-critical cycle systems. However, the behavior of sudden leaks in such systems remains unclear, which poses a challenge in assessing the risk of leakage. This work is focused on the decompression behavior of VLE state CO2 with different volume fractions of vapor phases in high-pressure pipeline leakage, specifically with the development of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model with a nonequilibrium phase transition and the real gas model. The results suggest that the Peng-Robinson Equation of State (PR EoS) is more conservative in predicting the degree of superheat than that of Span-Wagner (S-W) EoS and GERG-2008 EoS. Moreover, it is found that the initial volume fraction of the vapor phase in VLE state CO2 plays a crucial role in determining the characteristics of sudden leakage, such as pressure, temperature, and decompression wave speed both inside and outside the pipe. However, the position of the Mach disk remains unaffected by the initial volume fraction of the vapor phase. The initial vapor volume fraction of 0.2 has the most significant impact on the transient behaviors of the leakage, that is, the speed of the initial decompression wave is approximately 1.46 times slower than that of pure liquid CO2, the pressure and temperature start to decrease approximately 0.46 ms after those of pure liquid CO2, which is about 5.1 times later. Additionally, the peak pressure of the near-field jet is 6.3% higher and the maximum velocity is 11.4% higher than that of pure liquid CO2. It hopes that this work will contribute to the improvement of research models that assess the consequences of potential high-pressure pipeline rupture scenarios.