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oa Reproduction of complicated scale form in pipe systems from hydrodynamic perspectives
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, The 22nd International Symposium on Recent Advances in Exploration Geophysics (RAEG 2018), May 2018, Volume 2018, p.1 - 4
Abstract
Scale precipitation could seriously damage all flow path equipment in oil, gas and geothermal power plants. The formation process of scale is very complex and some phenomena which cannot be explained by simple chemical kinetics need to be considered. One of them is the local scale deposition at the joint of piping structure, and we attempted its prediction and visualization by the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for a more advanced analysis on silica particle motion in a flow of geothermal fluid based on fluid dynamics. We improved the stability of flow calculation coupled with the microscopic analysis. In this process, we extracted shear and normal flow with respect to the virtual wall surface, which is calculated by evening out the solid-fluid boundary in the LBM-simulation. We succeeded in reproducing the complicated scale development protruding into the flow due to the influence from flow properties in the field. Furthermore, we indicated that the scale shape changes depending on the pressure difference in inlet and outlet boundaries. This means the flow condition can provide an account of structural difference and our analysis has wide versatility for scale related problems in earth resource engineering.