Presentation
Experiments of oil jets in churn flow without and with dispersant: Measurements of hydrodynamics and the oil droplet size distribution
SessionMeet the Poster Authors
DescriptionOil and gas are likely to emanate together from a subsea oil blowout. The presence of large volume fraction of gas could cause the flow to be in churn flow regime, whereby oil and gas tumble violently within the pipe and is different from bubbly flow commonly assumed. The oil droplet and gas bubble size distributions in the plumes greatly depend on the flow regime and on the dispersant to oil ratio. We conducted experiments of three phase (oil and air released into water) jets in a 2.6 m height water tank without and with Corexit9500 at DOR 1:200. The results showed that the application of dispersant significantly decreased the droplet sizes for both oil-only flow and oil-air jets, indicating its effectiveness when air phase presented. The results also demonstrated that the churn flow caused the decrease of oil droplet sizes under the condition of same effective momentum for oil-only jets, indicating that additional turbulence was introduced in the flow compared to bubbly flow. The numerical model VDROP-J was applied to predict the oil droplet sizes and used for the analysis of turbulence due to churn flow.
Event Type
Poster
TimeMonday, May 13th5:00pm - 6:00pm CDT
LocationExhibit Hall G
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