Recreating Riser Slugging Flow Based on an Economic Lab-sized Setup

As a kind of periodic phenomenon, the slugging flow in the offshore oil & gas production addresses a lot of attentions, due to its limitation of production rate, periodic overload processing facilities, and even direct cause of emergent shutdown. This work studies the emulation of the riser slugging flow in the offshore oil & gas production, by constructing an economical lab-sized setup in the university campus. Firstly, the construction and used components for the lab setup are illustrated; then, the constructed setup is validated by checking the consistency with some existing typical riser slug model, besides extensive experimental tests. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this simple setup can recreate the key features of slugging flow phenomenon with reasonable preciseness, and it serves as a good platform for further slug control study.