Regular Article
A finite-element algorithm for Stokes flow through oil and gas production tubing of uniform diameter
1
School of Engineering, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3FX Aberdeen, UK
2
Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Eduardo Mondlane University, 257 Maputo, Mozambique
* Corresponding author: l.akanji@abdn.ac.uk
Received:
16
February
2020
Accepted:
28
August
2020
Stokes flow of a Newtonian fluid through oil and gas production tubing of uniform diameter is studied. Using a direct simulation on computer-aided design of discretised conduits, velocity profiles with gravitational effect and pressure fields are obtained for production tubing of different inner but uniform diameter. The results obtained with this new technique are compared with the integrated form of the Hagen–Poiseuille equation (i.e., lubrication approximation) and data obtained from experimental and numerical studies for flow in vertical pipes. Good agreement is found in the creeping flow regime between the computed and measured pressure fields with a coefficient of correlation of 0.97. Further, computed velocity field was benchmarked against ANSYS Fluent; a finite element commercial software package, in a single-phase flow simulation using the axial velocity profile computed at predefined locations along the geometric domains. This method offers an improved solution approach over other existing methods both in terms of computational speed and accuracy.
© L.T. Akanji & J. Chidamoio, published by IFP Energies nouvelles, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
