A Comparative Study of Turbulence in Stirred Reactors and Pipelines for a Sour Gas-Oil-Water System, Used in Hydrate Formation Predictions and Flow Assurance Considerations

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experimental studies were applied to evaluate a novel turbulence-based scaleup method capable of matching systems with different geometries. This study specializes in determining optimum agitation speed in laboratory reactors used for flow assurance studies to match the hydrodynamic condition of three-phase flow in pipelines. Turbulence parameters were calculated using CFD for a laboratory-scale reactor at various mixing speeds and a real large-scale pipe. The calculations for the pipeline matched the reactor working at 590 rev/min, identifying the ideal mixing speed, the speed at which the reactor is closest to the pipeline regarding the fluid mixing and turbulence. This finding was compared with flow regime and mixing data of both geometries in the literature and finally confirmed by experiments. It was empirically proved that a turbulence analysis based on geometry-independent parameters could link systems’ mixing conditions with different scales and geometries.